Team Member
Saliha Akbaş
Saliha Akbaş is an XR Designer and HCI Researcher whose work sits at the intersection of embodied interaction, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction. She completed her Ph.D. at Koç University's KARMA XR Lab, where she developed a design framework for avatar abstraction in XR movement contexts, engaging directly with dancers and athletes to explore how the virtual body functions as a reflective medium for movement learning and performance. Her broader research spans social experiments in virtual space, VR-based psychosis simulations co-designed with medical practitioners, and LLM-driven conversational agents embedded in immersive XR environments. Her work has been published at leading HCI venues including ACM VRST and ACM MOCO, and she contributes to the TÜBİTAK 1001 project on the behavioral foundations of migrant integration through VR simulation. Her interdisciplinary background in psychology, cultural studies, and design informs a research practice that is attentive to lived experience and embodied knowledge.