I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining UMD, I have worked at Adobe Research as a research scientist and at Stanford University as a postdoctoral fellow. I received my PhD degree in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech.

I serve as a co-chair (with Erin Molloy) of the Computer Science Departmental Honors Program, which offers undergraduate students an opportunity to engage more deeply with computer science through research and advanced study. Interested students are encouraged to enroll in CMSC396H: Undergraduate Honors Seminar, a 1-credit introduction seminar to the program.

Research

My current research centers on Computational Design for Data Visualization: developing computational approaches for creating, understanding, and reasoning about expressive data visualizations, with the broader goal of supporting human understanding and communication in an increasingly AI-mediated world. A central theme of my research is developing computational representations that are both generative and manipulable: providing high-level abstractions and operations for systematically creating visualization structures and behaviors, while representing the resulting semantic components as first-class entities that can be inspected, transformed, and reasoned about. Mascot, a scene-centric grammar for visualization structure and behavior, embodies this perspective. To ground this work in practice, I also study application-driven visualization problems in domains such as cybersecurity, where real-world information and user needs motivate new visualization approaches and reveal new challenges for computational visualization design.

I direct the Human-Data Interaction Research Group, where we study research problems at the intersection of data visualization, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. Visit our lab website to learn more about our current research, projects, and publications.

If you are an undergraduate or Master's student at UMD looking for research opportunities with me, please read this page first.