Research Through the Practice of Visualization Design with Miriah Meyer

This is a joint event with about a dozen Data Visualization Meetup groups. Registration is a two-step process. The first step is to click on the "Attend" button. The second step is to click on the Zoom link on the Meetup page (shown to attendees only). When it says "Join the event" click continue, which will bring you to a Zoom registration page. Do it now... you're not fully registered for the event until you've completed both steps. Interpret "Join the event" as "Register for the event."

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An increasingly rich body of visualization research comes from the learning that happens during the practice of visualization design. In this talk Miriah will discuss design study—a type of inquiry grounded in visualization design practice—and the variety of research contributions that emerge from it, from new visualization techniques to novel design methods. She'll also share results from her collaborations with data analysts in a wide range of fields, as well as from our work with people analyzing their own personal data.

Miriah is an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. She co-directs the Visualization Design Lab, which focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping people make sense of complex data, and on the development of methods for helping visualization designers make sense of the world. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at Utah Miriah was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Miriah is the recipient of a NSF CAREER grant, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow award. She was named a University of Utah Distinguished Alumni, both a TED Fellow and a PopTech Science Fellow, and included on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top young innovators. She was also awarded an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.