My name is Cass Zegura;* I am a first year M.S. student in UC Irvine’s Informatics program. I graduated in May 2020 with a BA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University, with a focus on digital media and queer/trans theory. This dual interest in theory and practice has informed much of my academic career thus far, as is exemplified by games like In Betw♀️♀️n and my undergraduate thesis paper Gay Engines: Imagining a Queer Development Platform for Video Games. You can check out my portfolio page for more information on these projects and others.
I’m also passionate about teaching! I was a teaching assistant several times while at Brown, and this fall, I will be a teaching assistant at Irvine for Informatics 133, User Interaction Software. I see teaching as an opportunity to spark passion in others and knock down barriers to access, hopefully making computer science a more equitable field in the process.
I greatly anticipate my time at Irvine as an opportunity to learn about conducting computer science research, to refine my existing skills in academic writing and teaching, and to further develop as an independent scholar. Zot zot zot!
*The name on some of my work is Carmen. The reason for this discrepancy is that I am nonbinary. In addition to going by Cass nowadays, I also use the personal pronouns they/them/theirs.