Professional Bio
I am a computer science engineer turned game developer turned researcher.
I’ve graduated at the ENSIMAG, the Upper National School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics in Grenoble, France. I have worked three years in the video game industry. First at Frogwares, Kyiv, Ukraine on World of Battles, a MMORTS, and then at Mimesis Republic, Paris on Mamba Nation, a MMO social game implemented in Scala, the functional language that inspired Java 9.
I have worked in the CRI development team from March 2013 to November 2014 on several projects: I implemented tools for educational games (GamEvolve/RedWire, RedMetrics, KnowNodes/Rhizi) and games themselves, mainly Hero.Coli (CRI page - main website). Hero.Coli is the game being demonstrated on the arcade cabinet downstairs, next to the kitchen, in front of the Learning Center. It is a game about synthetic biology designed with 2013 iGEM participants, which I then used during my PhD in the FIRE PhD program in the CRI to study the learning of synthetic biology with a video game.
I am now a post-doctoral researcher working on Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) with the Anshu team (Anshu, Rania, Nidhi). We are studying if and how video games can raise awareness about AMR and plan to develop our own.
Research Interests
My interests range from programming, gaming and gamification to crowdsourcing, Science and Health. My focus is on learning through gaming, simulations for education, computational biology. I am fond of in silico cell simulation, and creative and innovative use of video games - as tools for simulation or visualization (Hero.Coli and UnityMol), citizen science (FoldIt), and awareness, of course!
Selected Publications
RedWire: a novel way to create and re-mix games, CHI PLAY ‘14, Himmelstein et al. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2661315
Improving Citizen Science Games through Open Analytics Data, Human Computation, 2016, Himmelstein et al.
