Lauren Buck is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Games at the University of Utah, where she directs the Spatial Perception and Cognitive Engineering (SPACE) Lab. She also holds Adjunct Assistant Professor appointments in the Kahlert School of Computing and the Department of Psychology. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Samford University (2015), followed by an M.S. (2020) and PhD (2021) in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.

Dr. Buck’s research lies at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), cognitive science, and immersive technology. She explores how technical design elements of extended reality systems (XR) – across both hardware and software – shape human perception, cognition, and social behavior. Her lab develops multi-user XR applications and investigates how design decisions impact user experience, perception, and interaction. Her current work focuses on self-avatar systems, examining factors such as avatar creation and animation fidelity, and how these influence users’ cognitive processing and interpersonal dynamics in virtual environments.