Ria Gualano
Graduate Student, Department of Communication
Ria studies VR accessibility, disability arts, and university accommodations with a focus on invisible disabilities. As a member of the Virtual Embodiment Lab and the New Media & Society Working Group, she hopes to produce actionable guidelines for enhancing the inclusivity of social, educational and work spaces. She is particularly interested in pairing traditional research methods with the creative arts and is organizing a Spring 2024 disability arts exhibition. At her undergraduate institution, she led projects on the psychological effects of social media use and collaborated with teams on research related to memory, interpersonal relationships, and well-being.
Education
- B.A. (with Honors), Psychology, Johns Hopkins University
Interests
Accommodations, avatars, computer-mediated communication, disability arts, invisible disabilities, media psychology, social media, virtual reality
Awards & Honors
- Dean’s Excellence Fellowship, Graduate School Dean’s Scholar, Cornell University (2022)
- Gualano, R. J.*, Jiang, L.*, Zhang, K.*, Won, A. S., & Azenkot, S. (2023, June). Expanding Inclusive Avatar Design: Understanding Invisible Disability Representation and Disclosure on Social VR Platforms. Poster presented at the XR Access Symposium. New York, NY.
- Gualano, R. J. & Bowen, J. (2022, February). Online, offline, or somewhere in between? A within-subjects examination of a domain-contingent self-concept. Poster presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention. San Francisco, CA.
- Gualano, R. J. & Bowen, J. (2021, October). Are our identities segmented in the digital age? The self-concept in online and offline domains. Poster presented at the Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies. Toronto, Canada.
- Gualano, R. J. & Bowen, J. (2021, September). Personality and web 2.0: Social media’s longitudinal impact on the self-concept. Poster presented at the Seventh International User Conference of the German Family Panel pairfam. Bremen, Germany.
- Gualano, R. J. (2021, April). The online self-concept: Measuring the domain-contingent expression of identity and personality. Abstract presented as panelist on the Social, Digital and Mass Media Panel at the 39th Annual Mid-Atlantic Undergraduate Social Research Conference. Shepherdstown, WV.
- Engineer, A., Gualano, R. J., Crocker, R. L., Smith, J. L., Maizes, V., Weil, A., & Sternberg, E. M. (2021). An integrative health framework for wellbeing in the built environment. Building and Environment, 205, 108253. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2021.108253
Ria in the news
News
- Department of Communication