We here at EMAC are excited to announce another new faculty member, Cindy Shen. Cindy will be joining us in Fall of 2010. Currently she is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Cindy’s research interests are social media, online communities, virtual worlds, and social network analysis. Her dissertation project examines the social dynamics among players in EverQuest II, a large massively multi-player online game. Cindy is a researcher with the Virtual Worlds Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Research Lab. She is also an active member of VOSS: Understanding and Enabling Network Dyanmics in Virtual Communities, also funded by NSF.

In addition to to her scholarly work, Cindy is generally interested in exploring the motivation of various online behaviors, such as playing social games and paying real money for virtual items in Farmville.

You can check out her research page and/or follow her on Twitter.