Presenter

Paul Diefenbach, PhD, Associate Professor in Drexel University’s Digital Media department, created the game design curriculum ranked in the top ten in North America by The Princeton Review. He is founder of Drexel’s game research laboratory, the RePlay Lab, and leads projects in BCI, neuroplasticity, healthcare games, and serious games. He is also founder and CTO of two companies in healthcare: enablegames.com which provides active video games for physical therapy for people with disabilities, and cere-sim.com which develops medical training simulations for 20,000 nurses. He has an extensive background in 3D, game development, and human factors and simulation and holds two patents. Prior to Drexel, he was founder and CTO of OpenWorlds Inc., and he was PI on Phase 1 & 2 SBIRs for NASA and the Army and provided technology for Lockheed, Sony, Microsoft, and Boeing for 15 years. His pioneering 1996 Ph.D. on multi-pass rendering serves as the platform for today’s modern real-time graphics, and led to consulting for companies such as Nvidia. While at UPenn, was also a key developer of the Jack® software at UPenn’s Human Modeling and Simulation (HMS) Laboratory under Dr. Norman Badler. He has presented at worldwide conferences including SIGGRAPH and Eurographics, and has been featured on the CBS Evening News. Dr. Diefenbach holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.S. in Computer Science from RPI.