I was born and grew up in Hong Kong. Both of my parents were actually in the US for college before they moved back to Hong Kong, so I was raised bilingual (in Cantonese and English). I came to the US when I was 14 for boarding school. Being fluent in American English but not in American culture triggered a period of culture shock for me.

I then went to Haverford College outside of Philadelphia where I majored in Psychology with a concentration in Computer Science. It was while I was at Haverford that I met Doug Davis in my second-year methods sequence. Doug got me interested in the Internet for both methodological and thematic reasons. It was after Doug's course that I became fascinated with tools for digital manipulation (web pages, graphics, etc.).

During my junior year, two seniors a year ahead of me (Mike Oswalt and Adam Correia) did their theses on the personality differences among gamers of different video game genres. One of those genres was the MMORPG. And so the department went out and got us a copy so we could try it out. I was the lab techie then and also helping Doug with other technical things so I got to try out the game as well. The year was 1999 and the game was EverQuest, which at that point had been out for a little over a year.

For some reason, I was the only one of the three who enjoyed playing the game. Later that year, I worked with Doug on an independent study exploring EverQuest players via online surveys with mostly qualitative questions. When my senior year came around, I did a much larger survey project of EverQuest focusing on quantitative data as part of my senior thesis. From the beginning, I was interested in multiple aspects of this research. First of all, there was the interest in online games and their potential. Second, it let me experiment with technology in collecting data and presenting the research. And finally, I enjoyed the sustained interaction with the player community. I preferred this type of relationship to the typical "hit-and-run" style of quantitative research.

Towards the end of my senior year, I applied to Accenture for a job as a starting consultant in Philadelphia. In a strange twist of fate, I was recruited by a tech R&D group based in Chicago. This R&D group happened to be an internal research group in Accenture who did not know I had already been hired by Accenture. They had found out about me independently from my online presentations of MMORPG players.

So I ended up in Chicago because I thought the research job was a much better fit. Unfortunately, even though the projects I worked on all involved virtual environments in some way, I didn't feel my interests aligned with the commercial focus of the group. And even while I was working full-time, I continued to do the survey work on the side. So I finally decided to apply to grad school.

As a side note, The Daedalus Project was created at this point in time. Up to this point, I had used individual online reports to present my findings and it was becoming cumbersome and disorganized. So I migrated to a bloggish front-end to facilitate indexing and archiving.

I started grad school at Stanford in the Fall of 2003 in the Department of Communication. At Stanford, I worked with Jeremy Bailenson in conducting experimental research in immersive virtual environments. In addition, I also had the opportunity to work with PARC's PlayOn group in analyzing aggregate-level data. So there is a great deal of convergence happening and it's fun being able to explore the same space using different methodologies.

I graduated from the Ph.D. program in June of 2007 and am currently a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).