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Cecilia R. Aragon Associate Professor, 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)  Cecilia Aragon is an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and the eScience Institute at the University of Washington, where she directs the Scientific Collaboration and Creativity Lab. Previously, she was a computer scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) for six years, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004. She is currently a joint faculty member at LBNL. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Her current research focuses on human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) in scientific collaborations, distributed creativity, information visualization, usability and sustainability, usability and security, collaborative games, the visual understanding of very large data sets, and how social media and new methods of computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice. She has developed novel visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has authored or co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, visualization, visual analytics, image processing, machine learning, cyberinfrastructure, and astrophysics. In 2008, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers, for her work in collaborative data-intensive science.
Her research has been
recognized with five Best Paper awards since 2004,
and she was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic
Business Magazine.
Her work on the Sunfall data visualization and workflow management system
for the Nearby Supernova Factory helped advance the study of supernovae in order
to reduce the statistical uncertainties on key cosmological parameters that
categorize dark energy, one of the grand challenges in physics today.
Aragon has an interdisciplinary
background, including over 15 years of software development experience in industry
and NASA, and a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company.
Aragon's early research was in theoretical computer science and analysis
of algorithms. She is the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of a data structure,
the treap, which has been commended for its elegance and efficiency,
and is now widely used in production applications ranging from wireless networking
to memory allocation to fast parallel aggregate set operations.
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,
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.
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