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 that enable people and AI to better create and work with expressive data visualizations for understanding and communicating data. A major focus of my research is Mascot, a scene-centric grammar that provides a unified abstraction for visualization structure and behavior. At its core, Mascot treats scene components as first-class, manipulable entities. This provides a computational foundation for constructing, decomposing, transforming, and reasoning about visualization designs. To ground this work in practice, I also study application-driven visualization problems in domains such as cybersecurity, where real-world data 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.