ROGELIO CARDONA-RIVERA

Dr. Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera (he/they) is a Puerto Rican Associate Professor and Founding Faculty of the Division of Games, where they direct the Laboratory for Quantitative Experience Design, a community of scholars who invent liberatory artificial intelligence technologies to augment the design of virtual worlds.

Dr. Cardona-Rivera is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, has been recognized by the Mellon Foundation as an Early Career Scholar in Design Justice & AI, and has served as a U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellow and National GEM Fellow.

Rogelio originally joined the University of Utah in the Fall of 2017 as an Associate Instructor (tenure-track), with shared-appointment in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering (EAE) Program and the School of Computing (the tenure home). After completing the Ph.D. degree in Spring of 2019, Professor Cardona-Rivera switched to serving as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in the Fall of 2019. In the Spring of 2023, after receiving a unanimous support vote for re-appointment at the culmination of their tenure-track mid-term review, Professor Cardona-Rivera voluntarily shifted their tenure-track appointment from the Kahlert School of Computing to co-found the Division of Games. During the Summer of 2026, Professor Cardona-Rivera was awarded tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in the Division of Games, becoming the first Founding Utah Games member to do so.