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I’m on sabbatical from August 2024 – May 2025. Email is the best method of communication.

tl;dr – New Ph.D. students to my research group can only be supported by a department TA-ship. Everyone who applies is given full consideration. List me as one of the professors you are interested in working with. No, you don’t need to email me ahead of time.

• The lessons learned from taking virtual patients from research to realization, please email me.
• Please fill out a LEAN BUSINESS CANVAS (15 minutes) then email me.

If you are interested in learning about Virtual Reality research: 

• If you are not a UF student and are looking for a graduate research assistantship (RA), teaching assistantship (TA), or grader, do not email me to evaluate your resume. Please apply to the University of Florida. That’s all you need to do. If there is some additional information that you are looking for, please email me with the specific question you have that isn’t included already on this website. Read the info on funding here from our graduate program director.
• If you are an undergraduate UF student looking for research experience, welcome! I too was an undergraduate researcher and my research group supports an undergraduates pursuing research. We do require students apply by at latest the with at least two years remaining. Next,
  • Learn about the work we do: Visit the Virtual Experiences Research Group where we research how to improve how humans communicate by creating virtual experiences that improve people’s communication skills, training, and health. Check out our OKRs (inspired by Measure What Matters by John Doerr)
  • Learn how to join us! Information for prospective research students. Check out how to join us! 
• If you an undergraduate UF student looking for senior projects/independent study: Information for senior projects/independent study.
• The ​VR For the Social Good Initiative, I am a part of the Human-Centered Computing@UF, Previous presentations, NSF Early CAREER Proposal.

If you are interested in courses I’ve taught:

• Fall 2025 – no classes (Administrative Release – GPD)
• Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 – Sabbatical 
• Previous courses
  • User Experience Design (Spring 2024, Fall 2023, Spring 2023, Fall 2022)
  •  VR for the Social Good (Fall 2020, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018 (sabbatical), Fall 2017 (sabbatical))
  • Human-Computer Interaction (Spring 2017, Spring 2021)
  • Virtual Reality (Spring 2016)
  • Computer Graphics (Spring 2008)

Bio: Benjamin Lok is a Professor and Graduate Program Director for the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering Department at the University of Florida (UF) and the CTO of Rovex, Inc., previously co-founded Shadow Health (now a part of Elsevier), and is on the advisory board of numerous academic-technology startups. Professor Lok is the UF Faculty Lead for the NSF I-Corp Southeast Regional Hub. Professor Lok’s research focuses on using virtual humans and mixed reality to train communication skills in virtual environments, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics. Professor Lok received a Ph. D. (2002, advisor: Dr. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.) and M.S. (1999) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.S. in Computer Science (1997) from the University of Tulsa. He did a post-doc fellowship (2003) under Dr. Larry F. Hodges. 

​Professor Lok was inducted into the inaugural IEEE VGTC VR Academy (2022), received the UF Innovator of the Year Award (2019), a UF Term Professorship (2017-2020), the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Faculty Mentoring Award (2016), an NSF Career Award (2007-2012), and the UF ACM CISE Teacher of the Year Award in 2005-2006. He and his Virtual Experiences Research Group students have received Best Paper Awards at IVA 2019, IEEE VR 2008, and ACM I3D (Top 3, 2003). He was the chair of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (2018-2021). He has been the general co-chair of IEEE VR 2014 and IEEE VR 2013, and program co-chaired the ACM VRST 2009, IEEE Virtual Reality 2010, and IEEE Virtual Reality 2011 conferences. Professor Lok is a journal associate editor of ​IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

My homepage © 2025 by benjamin Lok is licensed under Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International