Rate My Professor Manolya Kavakli-Thorne

With over 35 years of interdisciplinary research experience, Professor Kavakli-Thorne specializes in human-computer interaction, human-machine interaction, virtual and augmented reality, integrated system design, and game engineering, with current emphases on digital twins, gamified system design, and mixed reality simulations. She has secured 58 competitive grants totaling over £18.1 million from sources including EU Horizon, Australian Research Council, UKRI, NSF China, and others, funding pioneering facilities such as the first Virtual Reality Lab in Sydney (2005), Simulation Hub and CEPET Research Center (2015), and Virtual Production Studio in Canberra (2022). She has supervised 14 postdoctoral fellows and 119 postgraduate students. Her 240 refereed publications have garnered over 3700 citations (h-index 26). Notable works include 'The structure of concurrent cognitive actions: A case study on novice and expert designers' (Design Studies, 2002), 'Sketching as mental imagery processing' (Design Studies, 2001), and 'Human-Centered User Interface Design for Explainable AI in Chest Radiology: A Multi-Phase Co-Design Approach' (IEEE Access, 2026). She has received awards such as Best Paper at the 42nd IEEE ICDCS (2022), multiple best paper awards at conferences including ICIEA (2018), DESRIST (2017), and CENTRIC (2014), and fellowships from the Turkish Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UK societies in the 1990s. She has delivered keynote speeches on virtual reality, gesture recognition, and HCI at international conferences.