Speaker: Miriah Meyer, Assistant Professor, University of Utah

Location: Maxwell-Dworkin G125, 33 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Time: Informal lunch with speaker, 12:30pm. Talk, 1:00pm.

Abstract: Advances in measurement devices in the last decade have given rise to an explosion of scientific data, data which holds the promise of curing human disease, predicting the future health of our planet, and unlocking the secrets of the universe. In biology, access to massive amounts of quantitative data has fundamentally changed how discoveries are made, and now an important component of the scientific process is making sense of this data using visualization methods. For most biologists, however, their visualization toolbox is made up of only broadly-available tools that were designed for over-arching problems, often leaving them without answers to their specific research questions.

A growing trend in the visualization community is to develop tools that focus on specific, real-world problems. Called a design study, the process of developing these tools relies on a close collaboration with end-users as well as the use of methods from design. In this talk I'll present several design studies that target complex, biological data analysis, from discovering trends in molecular networks to understanding the results of comparative genomics algorithms.

Speaker bio: Miriah is a USTAR assistant professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping scientists make sense of complex data. 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 was named a TED Fellow for 2013, as well as awarded a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship in 2012. She has also been included on MIT Technology Review's TR35 list of the top young innovators and Fast Company's list of the 100 most creative people. She is the recipient of a NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow award, and an AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune.

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