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)!

I’ll be teaching a course at SIGGRAPH called “Communicating Science Through Visualization in an Age of Alternative Facts“.

SIGGRAPH is kind of a big deal. Nervous and excited!

The course notes are available here.

There’s been some exciting stuff going on! I’ve been collaborating with Dr. Jill Naiman at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to create ytini, an open-source middleware between the scientific analysis and visualization Python package, yt, and the visual effects software, Houdini.

We made a website with code, tutorials, and downloads at ytini.com, that teaches anyone how to make cinematic scientific visualizations. I may be putting myself out of a job!

We published a paper about it, and we just started working on our second, after having a major breakthrough with the help of my intern, Haoming Lai: We can now render Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) data.

This is a big deal, because AMR is a common data format for astrophysics and climate sciences. It consists of nested, multi-resolution grids, which let you have more detail where there are more interesting things going on in the data. On the other hand, Houdini only works with uniform, cartesian grids… You can see how we made this work by following the tutorial here. Also, stay tuned for the next paper!

I gave a TED talk last week! Here’s an article about it. I wonder if the video of the talk will get posted soon?

Leading a group discussion at the end of the event. I don’t remember what I was talking about at this moment, but it sure looks like I was making an important point!

Posing with the TEDxUIUC logo

We’ve been working on this one for a while now; just got to see the teaser trailer. It’s a pretty cool topic, and it has some great vis (obviously)!

We only worked on a couple of shots for this, and I hardly know anything about the rest of the movie. Can’t wait to see it! My first IMAX film!

Wrapping up work on “Solar Superstorms”. Tom Lucas, the director, is in town today. We’ll be previewing the rough cut at Staerkel Planetarium tonight. In a couple weeks, the celebrity narrator will be recording the script (Can I announce who it is yet?? You’re gonna love it)! I’m so excited!

Sneak peeks at some of my favorite shots below.

Evolution of the early universe. Simulation by John Wise.

Just below the surface of the sun. Simulations by Robert Stein and Pat Moran.

A massive coronal mass ejection. Simulation by Yuhong Fan.

Solar plasma hitting Earth. Simulation by Homa Karimabadi.