I love to see data come to life.
Working with data should feel like a superpower. This is as true for end-users as for professional data analysts -- and anyone who happens to have had a lot of information that they want to make sense of, or communicate to others.
I bring together a deep expertise in data visualization with skills in qualitative and quantitative user research, and software development. I use them to build amazing tools to empower users with data.
I discovered the joys of visualizing data sometime in elementary school, when I tried to go deep on the definitions of a line chart. Since then, every project I've worked on has somehow rediscovered the sheer joy of playing with data, and sharing it with others.
I got my PhD in 2004 from the University of California, Irvine. From 2004-2018, I helped people work with data for Microsoft Research. I left to try my hand being closer to product; I wrote about this transition in a blog post. From 2018-2022, I was Principal Design Researcher for Honeycomb.io, a startup in San Francisco dedicated to system observability and supporting DevOps.
Some broad research themes
DevOpS AND DATA
My time at Honeycomb brought me a new perspective on domain-specific visualization.
User experience with big data
Interactive data analysis completely changes with terabytes and petabytes. Lets re-imagine visualization for big data.