Yiming "Skylar" Lei

Yiming “Skylar” Lei is a doctoral student in the Department of Media and Information. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Sociology at Sun Yat-sen University in China and her Master’s degree in Emerging Media Studies at Boston University. Before coming to the U.S. and started her graduate school, she worked in Ipsos, a marketing research agency, for both quantitative and qualitative teams. She is interested in studying the psychological processing and effects of simulated media world created through interactive media technologies such as video games, virtual and augmented reality. More specifically, she is interested in how factors inside and outside the media simulation (e.g. technology-enabled game mechanics, social context of gameplay, player communities) influence users’ presence, empathy, dehumanization, disinhibition, and prosocial behavior. She is also an avid gamer and a tech enthusiast, along with some layperson passion for physics and graphic design.