Julia Chatain

Background

About Julia Chatain

I currently work as a Senior Scientist at the Singapore-ETH Centre (SEC) where I create the Future Embodied Learning Technologies (FELT) program. I previously lead the group EduTech at ETH Zurich, a team gathering expertise on designing, implementing, and evaluating cutting-edge educational technology for higher education using a co-design methodology. During my doctorate at ETH Zurich, I explored how embodied interaction can make mathematics more graspable. I looked into embodied learning, embodied interaction, and avatar embodiment, and offered an integrated design framework for embodied learning activities in Virtual Reality. I also implemented and evaluated several VR games to explore how students move while making sense of abstract mathematic concepts, and how we can support these bodily actions through interaction design. I hold an engineering degree from École Polytechnique (Paris, France), as well as Master of Science from EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). I worked as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher at Inria (Bordeaux, France), and as a Software Engineer at ETH (Zurich, Switzerland). Throughout my career, I organized and coached in several workshops related to STEM gender diversity such as Django Girls, Girls Code Too, or Girls Go MINT. In my research journey, I am interested in embodiment, education, video games, XR, tangibles, and adopt a user-centered perspective.