With the retirement of Professor Donna J. Cox, I have taken over as lead of the Advanced Visualization Lab. Donna built the lab up from nothing, she’s a pioneer in the fields of computer graphics and scientific visualization, she has multiple lifetime achievement awards… I have some very, very big shoes to fill. Read about Donna’s legacy here.

Wow! Everyone’s Google search results are a little different, but I bet if you Google “cinematic scientific visualization”, the top results will be my work (i.e. everything in this picture).

What can I do with all this power??

I put together a demo reel showing some of the projects I have contributed to during my time at the NCSA. Check it out and leave your comments.

That’s what a Master’s degree means right?

I look forward to having free time again, now that I’m no longer studying half-time while working full-time!

I was interviewed for episode 5 of Houdini’s new series, Hip.TV, for the “science and art” episode. Check it out!

I kicked off a new collaboration today with Andrea Ghez, the most-recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Not only did Dr. Ghez discover the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, she’s also a wonderfully pleasant and down-to-Earth person! Working together won’t suck (<– terrible black hole pun).

Today, Mark SubbaRao, NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio lead, and I kicked off a cross-group “journal club” between our teams. All of us got together and had a lively discussion about an academic journal article on science miscommunication that I picked out, and then we did a show-and tell to talk about what each of our groups is working on. It’s nice to be able to geek out about this stuff together, we’re going to do this every month!

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”).