VISUALIZING BIOLOGICAL DATA VIZBI

VIZBI 2013 first keynote speaker will be Dr. Sara Irina Fabrikant. She is currently an Associate Professor of Geography and head of the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group in the GIScience Center at the Geography Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research and teaching interests lie in geographic information visualization and visual analytics (geovis), GIScience and cognition, graphical user interface design and evaluation, including dynamic cartography.

She was awarded a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship to study Geographic Information Science for one academic year at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1993. She is the current elected chair of the International Cartographic Association’s Cognitive Visualization Commission. She publishes in a variety of GIScience/geovis related journals and is currently a member of the Editorial Boards of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Cartographica, Cartographic Perspectives, Computers Environment and Urban Systems, Journal of Spatial Information Science, Revue Internationale de Géomatique, and Transactions in GIS, in addition to her Program Committee memberships for various international GIScience/geovis related conferences (e.g., GIScience, COSIT, InfoVis (UK), etc.). She has been the Program Committee Chair of the GIScience 2010 conference. She has made various presentations at national and international professional meetings, including invited keynotes and other lectures at universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and New Zealand. Other service includes memberships of the Association of American Geographers, the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on Geovisualization, the North American Cartographic Information Society, and the Swiss Society of Cartography.

This year’s Art & Biology keynote address will be delivered by Felice Frankel, a renowned science photographer and a researcher in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The CSIRO-sponsored outreach keynote titled “Communicating Science Visually” will also be simulcast live to Melbourne, Australia as part of the CSIRO workshops on “Effective Visualisation for Science” and “Bioinformatics Focus on Analytical Methods”.

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, Felice’s images have been published in over 200 journal articles and/or covers and various other publications for general audiences such as National Geographic, Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and New Scientist among others. Felice foundered the IMAGE AND MEANING workshops and conferences, which promote public understanding of science through visual expression. She was principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded program, Picturing to Learn, which studies how visual representations aid in learning. She and her work have been often profiled in the mainstream press, and she exhibits throughout the United States and in Europe. Her limited edition photographs are included in a number of corporate and private collections.

Graham Johnson is an outstanding medical illustrator, animator and visualisation expert with over 15 years of professional experience. He holds a masters degree in Medical and Scientific Illustration from the John Hopkins School of Medicine and a PhD in Biophysics from the Scripps Research Institute. He illustrated the textbook Cell Biology (written by Pollard and Earnshaw) and has created numerous scientific visuals ranging from journal covers to pedagogic animations and game designs. He currently works at the UCSF as a qb3@UCSF Faculty Fellow. His visuals have won numerous prizes including the best video at the 2011 NSF International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge as well as the best poster at VIZBI 2012. He was a speaker at the VIZBI 2012 meeting where he spoke about the challenges of visualizing “mesoscale” data and the application of uPy and autoFill frameworks  (the video can be viewed here). As part of this year’s tutorial series, Graham will give an introduction on uPy (ubiquitous Python API), a system that facilitates interaction with molecular graphics software with animation systems such as Maya, Cinema 4D and Blender.