Is a picture worth a thousand words? Or perhaps, an image is worth a thousand numbers. Definitively! If you ask Miriah Meyer, a new strategic recruitment in WASP.
How is it possible to make sense of all the data that is generated in our modern society? Professor Miriah Meyer, a new strategic recruitment in WASP, focuses her research on solving these questions. Designing new, innovative visualizations with and for people in the world, is the major focus in Miriah Meyers research. Her cornerstones are interdisciplinary collaborations for solving scientific questions in several fields. This includes working with people both within and outside the academy, and to solve questions both related to research and to our every-day lives.
As a result of her wide collaborations, Miriah has been able to broaden her knowledges in new fields:
-We design interactive visual interfaces to give people access to their data in a variety of ways. Then we put these new tools out in the world and study how they are used, and this can tell us about both visualization design as well as people’s relationships with data more generally.
Building a visual consensus model of the SARS-CoV-2 life cycle, in a collaboration project with biologists.
Miriah and her group work with a problem-driven approach, creating visualization systems that support exploratory complex data analysis tasks for a broad range of questions. They integrate methodologies from computer science, design, social science, and humanities. The human side of data science play a major role, raising the role of visualization as an interface between people and data.
-We try to understand situations in the world and think about which new features we can imagine.
Joining the WASP faculty and Linköping University
Miriah Meyer started on September 1st, 2021, as a professor at the Division of Media and Information Technology, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping. With an academic background in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, Miriah completed her PhD in Computer Science at University of Utah, 2008. She continued as a postdoc at Harvard University until 2011. During her last year as a postdoc, she was also a visiting scientist at the biomedical research center Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Miriah Meyer with her new LiU card. Photo: Miriah Meyer
-The postdoc changed everything for me. It made it possible to follow my own path for the first time and made the foundations for the work I am doing now.
Prior to joining the WASP faculty and Linköping University, Miriah was an associate professor in the school of computing at the University of Utah and a member of the Vis Design Lab in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. She views the WASP program and the position in Norrköping as an amazing opportunity for her to continue to develop as a researcher:
-I come from a more traditional Computer Science department. There is as world-class visualization research group here in Norrköping and the division is made up of people with several different backgrounds that come together.
Mirah is also very inspired by the environment with the museum space and visualization center:
-The research group here has done an extensive work with bringing visualization, data and technology to the general public.
Excited to meet new people and find new collaborators
At Campus Norrköping, Miriah is already involved in several ongoing projects, from smart cities to gender studies and she is also continuing to work with colleagues in Utah. Ahead, she will start building her own research group and is excited to meet new people and find new collaborators:
-I am looking for smart people who are curious and who are open to think about technology in different ways and that also are empathetic. People with different scientific backgrounds, not necessarily technology.
Miriah sees Sweden as a uniquely oriented place to be because of its long history of participatory design, democracy, and the value system of equality.
-Working with people in the world gives us a chance to think about and develop technology that can have an immediate impact in the world. Hopefully, you can make the world a better place than you found it.
Miriah Meyer, Scientific Awards
- AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship (2006)
- MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list of the top young innovators (2011)
- Fast company 100 Most creative people (2012)
- Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow (2012)
- TED Fellow (2013)
- PopTech Science Fellow (2013)
- University of Utah Distinguished Alumni (2017)
- WASP strategic recruitment (2021)
Miriahs personal homepage: https://miriah.github.io/
Published: November 26th, 2021