This year, I am one of 7 jurors for the prestigious SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. This is a qualifying festival for the Academy Awards! I’m starting to watch entries today, it’s going to be a busy (and fun and amazing) week.

I was invited to give a talk to Chicago ACM and IEEE Chicago last week. Had great attendance and lots of good discussion at the end. My high school computer science teacher was in the audience (along with about 100 other people)! Here is a recording.

Here is a short little 5-minute talk I gave a couple years ago about being a “woman engineer” (as opposed to a plain old “engineer”).

Me in 2012: I wish I could go to SIGGRAPH someday, that would make me so happy.
Me in 2014: I can’t believe I’m actually attending SIGGRAPH!
Me in 2017: I can’t believe I’m actually teaching a course at SIGGRAPH!
Me in 2020: I can’t believe I’m actually a peer reviewer for SIGGRAPH!

2012 me would be so proud.

I am officially an instructor! The Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) “3D Data Visualization for Science Communication” is available now at: https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-visualization-science-communication

It is a 4-week introductory course on scientific visualization, which I developed with my colleague, AJ Christensen.

I started the organization Women@NCSA at the beginning of 2017, and I am proud of what it has grown into! We were just awarded affiliate status with the international organization Women in High Performance Computing. More details here:

NCSA’s Women in Tech Group Awarded Women in High Performance Computing Affiliate Status

AJ and I were interviewed by SideFX, the makers of Houdini, at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference a few months ago. Here is the cool video they made, where we talk about how the AVL uses Houdini!

My colleague AJ Christensen and I gave a webinar on using Houdini for scientific visualization. Check it out below.

My high school, Northside College Prep, wrote an article about me and titled it “An Inspiration to Women in Computer Science“. That’s very sweet. I’m blushing!

Northside was recently ranked as the #2 best public high school in America. Go Mustangs!

Here is a demo reel showing off some of AVL’s work. I worked on some, but not all, of the shots in this video (the AVL has been around for a long time)!