Cuihua Shen

Professor Shen's research and teaching interests revolve around the structure and impact of social networks in virtual worlds. Her recent work has focused primarily on the patterns, effects and dynamic evolution of participants' social networks in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (EverQuest II, EVE Online, Chevaliers' Romance, and Dragon Nest) as well as other online communities designed for collaborative peer production, social support and entertainment. In her research she tries to match "big data" from online behavioral logs with "smaller data" collected from surveys and experiments. She has won several Top Paper awards from the International Communication Association.