Dr. Geoff Kaufman is the founder of the eHeart Lab and an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in social psychology from Ohio State University, and a B.A. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to joining the faculty in the HCII in 2015, Geoff was a postdoctoral researcher at Tiltfactor, a game design and research laboratory at Dartmouth College. His primary research focuses on how experience-taking – the mental simulation of characters experiences in fictional narratives, virtual worlds, or games – can change individuals’ self-concepts, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. This work has led to new insights regarding user-specific, design-specific, and situational variables that increase the impact of stories, games, and mediated interactions, and a set of empirically validated techniques and best practices for the creation of playful interventions for social change.