I am an Assistant Professor and member of the founding faculty of the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and direct the CU VisuaLab. I also hold an appointment in the Department of Computer Science and am a Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science. My research interests sit at the intersection of information visualization, data science, and cognitive science. Specifically, I look at the relationship between cognition and systems design--how does visualization design enable people to better understand and engage with data? How can visualization support accurate analysis in the face of increasingly large datasets? Through this process, I develop interactive visualization systems, guidelines, and techniques for exploring large, complex data. This work has inspired collaborations across a variety of domains including genomics, bioinformatics, the humanities, biochemistry, and perceptual psychology.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Sciences as part of the Visual Computing Lab under Prof. Michael Gleicher. I completed my B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Washington in 2009 as a NASA Space Grant Scholar and my M.S. in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 as part of the joint UW-Department of Energy BACTER Institute. My research interests include graphics and visualization, human-computer interaction, color science, data mining, machine learning, and perceptual science.

If you're interested in a project, please reach out to me. Always happy to chat!



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 News & Updates


09.2016: Workshop paper on misconceptions of cognitive load in visualization accepted to C4PGV.

09.2016: Talked about how big data is reshaping visualization design at Big Data Bootcamp Denver.

06.2016: Workshop talk at HCIC on visualization design in the IoT era.

06.2016: Attended EuroVis 2016 to present our work on visualizing word usage patterns.

04.2016: Awarded an Innovative Seed Grant to explore mobile data collection and analysis using novel technologies.

04.2016: Will be speaking about visualization-aware color design next month at EuroVis.

04.2016: Excited to have been a part of the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Colorado Event, honoring over 70 high school girls for their accomplishments in computing.

03.2016: Our paper (w. Stuffer, Sohail, & Gleicher) "TextDNA: Visualizing Word Usage Patterns with Configurable Colorfields" has been accepted for EuroVis 2016.

03.2016: Our work on ensemble coding for data visualization appeared in the Journal of Vision.

03.2016: Presented an introduction to data visualization at the Science Learner's Lunch.

11.2015: Gave the research seminar talk for the CU Libraries

 Upcoming Travel


10.22-10.28: IEEE VIS
Baltimore, MD