Joost van Dreunen is a PhD researcher at Columbia University and studies video games as an entryway into contemporary media culture. His dissertation explores the intersection between online communities, user-created game modifications, and media space. Joost is an affiliate researcher at the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, a member of the Center for Organizational Innovation, and the founder of the New York chapter for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA NY). Outside academia Joost works as a games analyst for companies such as DFC Intelligence (San Diego) and Nielsen Online.

He lives in New York with his wife Janelle, and maintains a blog at www.waffler.org.