Andrea Stevenson Won, PhD
Virtual Embodiment Lab, Cornell University
Andrea Stevenson Won is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, and the director of the Virtual Embodiment Lab. The lab’s research focuses on how mediated experiences change people’s perceptions, and how nonverbal behavior can be tracked and transformed in virtual environments. Applications include improving collaboration and social connections over distance. She will discuss recent work showing that social interactions in virtual reality can improve pain thresholds in participants when compared to solo virtual reality experiences.
Won has collaborated with faculty at Weill Cornell Medicine, the Duke University Pain Clinic, the Stanford Neuroscience and Pain Lab, the Stanford Psychiatry Clinic, and the Stanford University Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. Results of these collaborations have been published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, Pain Medicine, and Children.