Last year I had two posts (Susan Graham, Valerie Taylor) on Ada Lovelace Day, highlighting two pioneering women in computing. This year, the day sort of snuck up on me, even though I got a reminder in my inbox from the Finding Ada folks. A few snippets from other prominent tech folks trickled into my feedstream, and this afternoon I started scratching my head trying to come up with someone to post about. Then I only had to think back to a research meeting I had this very morning.
Thanks to my job, I frequently get to work on research projects with leading academic groups. For one, I’m working with the University of Maryland, Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) and in particular Dr. Catherine Plaisant. The most well-known HCIL member is probably Professor Ben Shneiderman, the lab’s founder and a giant of HCI research. But it’s fair to say Catherine has been, and still is, one of his key accomplices in building the seminal HCI lab. She’s Ben’s co-author on the fourth and fifth editions of Designing the User Interface, the textbook on computer user interfaces. That’s on top of a stellar research record of her own leading to some fundamental interaction techniques that are in wide use today. She recently reached the rank of Research Scientist, which is essentially Full Professor for non-tenure track researchers in the University of Maryland system.
A quick bio hit from her web page:
Dr. Catherine Plaisant is Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat d’Ingenieur degree in France in 1982 (similar to a Industrial Engineering PhD) and has written over 100 refereed technical publications on diverse subjects such as information visualization, digital libraries, universal access, image browsing, help, digital humanities, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies. She co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions of Designing the User Interface, one of the major books on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction.
At our meetings I’m always impressed by her guidance and encouragement of graduate students. She’s unceasingly enthusiastic, energetic, and has lots of good practical advice focusing students toward publishing. With just the little bit of funding my organization has been able to provide HCIL, her team has managed to get a paper accepted for the highly competitive SIGCHI conference, and has a couple more in the chute.
Catherine stands as a good alternative example of how to have research impact in computing without being on the tenure track. And she’s just fun to work with.