UBC Computer Science Professor Tamara Munzner Receives 2015 Visualization Technical Achievement Award

UBC Computer Science Professor Tamara Munzner is the recipient of the 2015 Visualization Technical Achievement Award.  The award is given in recognition of her foundational research that has 'produced a scientific basis for principles and design choices for visualization', which culminated in her 2014 book Visualization Analysis and Design from CRC Press.  The award was presented at the IEEE VIS Conference in Chicago on Oct 27, 2015. Tamara is the first female recipient of the award since the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee started the awards program in 2004.

Tamara Munzner is a full professor at the UBC Department of Computer Science.  Before she joined the department in 2002, she was a research scientist at Compaq Systems Research Centre after earning her PhD from Stanford University in 2000.  Her research interests are in the development, evaluation and characterization of visualization systems and techniques. Her problem-driven work has been targeted at many domains, ranging from genomics to journalism, and her technique-driven work includes graph drawing and dimensionality reduction. 

Tamara has published over 65 papers and chapters, given over 150 talks, and supervised over 30 students.  She and her group have released 20 software packages as open source. Tamara is currently chair of the VIS Executive Committee and member of the InfoVis Steering Committee, and has been papers chair for the InfoVis and EuroVis conferences.