Professional Affiliation

Professor in the Departments of Informatics and Education at the University of California, Irvine; Former White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Expert Bio

Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor in the Departments of Informatics and Education at the University of California, Irvine where she researches culture, cognition, and learning in the context of multiplayer online videogames. She is the co-director of the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center at University of California, Irvine where she teaches courses in games and society, quantitative methods, and games research. Her current projects include investigations of toxicity and extremism in gamer culture, the impact of casual games on well-being and stress, enriching esports for high school students, and reasoning with misinformation.

Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on videogames and digital media. She is the founder of the Federal Games Guild and the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic non-for-profit organization of game-related programs in higher education. Her research has been funded by the Anti-Defamation League, the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Universities of Cambridge, Wisconsin-Madison, and California-Irvine.  She has published over one hundred articles and book chapters including six conference proceedings, four special journal issues, and two books. She has worked closely with the National Research Council and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science, Wired, USA Today, New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor’s Degrees in mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband Dr. Kurt Squire is co-director of the GLS center at UCI. They live with their two adolescent gamers in Southern California where they enjoy surfing, trail running, camping, and all manner of headset-wearing, dps-flinging, computer-screened mayhem.