Manolya Kavakli-thorne

Biography

Associate Professor Manolya Kavakli is currently the Director of Postgraduate Coursework Program at the Department of Computing and the Director of Virtual Reality Lab at the Simulation Hub, Macquarie University. She is in charge of the Master of IT program. She supervised 47 postgraduate students to completion so far, including 26 MIT students, 7 Honours students, 10 MEng (Exchange) scholars, 11 PhD students, 2 MSc students, in addition to 7 Postdoctoral fellows. She is currently supervising 8 PhD, 3 MRes, and 1 MIT students.

Research Interest

Her earlier research studies focused on the simulation of designers' behaviour and users' interaction with computer aided design system. In her postdoctoral studies, she focused on computer graphics and visual cognition to be able to design more effective and intuitive software systems. She was awarded a NATO Science Fellowship in 1996 with her postdoctoral research project titled "An AI application for the transformation of 2D sketch to 3D geometric model" and started working on the analysis of hand drawn images. She worked at the Colour and Imaging Institute (former Design Research Centre), University of Derby, UK for a year. In 1998 she received a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Sydney, Australia and worked on the differences in cognitive processing between novice and expert designers at the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition for 1.5 years.