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Cecilia R. Aragon Associate Professor, Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science & Engineering Adjunct Associate Professor, Information School College of Engineering, eScience Institute University of Washington Seattle, WA 98195 Research Interests: scientist-computer interaction (human-computer interaction in scientific collaborations) computer-supported cooperative work and cyberinfrastructure eScience collaborative creativity visualization visual analytics usability and sustainability eye tracking Dr. Aragon is the director of the Scientific Collaboration and Creativity Lab at the University of Washington, and her current research focuses on how technology and visual interfaces mediate distributed scientific collaboration. She is interested in how social media and new methods of computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice. She develops and studies the use of visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets. She was the architect for Sunfall, a collaborative visual analytics system for supernova astrophysics. She developed an augmented-reality visualization system for helicopter pilots that increased their ability to land safely during simulated hazardous conditions. Her early work was in theoretical computer science. She was the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of the treap, a binary search tree in which each node has both a key and a priority, and the randomized search tree, which uses random priorities in treaps to achieve good average-case performance. With Johnson, McGeoch, and Schevon, she conducted the first extensive evaluation of the simulated annealing algorithm in combinatorial optimization problems. Education: Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, 2004;  Advisor: Prof. Marti Hearst M.S., Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley B.S. with Honors, Mathematics, California Institute of Technology Teaching: Winter 2012:   HCDE 511, Information Visualization Spring 2012:   HCDE 511, Information Visualization Awards: In 2008, she won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. She has won many other awards for her research, including five Best Paper awards since 2004. She was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine. Publications: Over 50 peer-reviewed and 100 non-peer-reviewed publications in conferences and journals in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, visualization, visual analytics, image processing, machine learning, and astrophysics. As of March 2012, her articles have been cited over 2,300 times (per Google Scholar). Service: Dr. Aragon is also active in program service and supporting diversity in computing. She is a founding member of Latinas in Computing, was a board member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), a founding member of Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council, the chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee, and has served as a reviewer and program committee member for numerous computer science conferences.   Contact Info Cecilia R. Aragon Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering University of Washington 407A Sieg Hall, Box 352315 Seattle, WA 98195 (206) 543-2567 (tel) (206) 543-8858 (fax) Affiliations and Projects: Scientific Collaboration and Creativity Lab Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington dub group, University of Washington eScience Institute, University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington Information School, University of Washington Advanced Computing for Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Visualization Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Nearby Supernova Factory NERSC Analytics Deep Sky Particle Data Group