Dr. Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken directs the Institute for Design Research and is a Senior Researcher at the Department of Design at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Switzerland. Additionally, she is CEO and Founder of the ZHdK-SpinOff Sphery Ltd. 

With her background in sports science and her expertise in design and game research (PhD, Technical University of Darmstadt), Anna specialized in exploring and shaping the digital future of sports, training, therapy and health. Since more than 10 years, her R&D work and teaching activities mainly focus on the interdisciplinary and user-centered design and evaluation of Serious & Applied Games and motivation design for health, sports and rehabilitation. 

For her R&D work, Anna was awarded several academic and industrial awards (e.g., SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award, Swiss Digital Shaper, FIBO Innovation and Trend Award 2019 & 2020, German Innovation Award 2020, German Design Award 2021) and was featured by TEDx Zurich 2018. Furthermore, she is part of an international consortium, who successfully established a standardization meta format for Serious Games with DIN in 2018, as well as a RAL Quality Mark on Serious Games.
Anna is also one of the founding members and Chairwoman of the International Mixed Reality Sports (XRS) Association.