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Dr. Cecilia R. Aragon Staff Scientist Advanced Computing for Science Computational Research Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Research Interests: scientist-computer interaction (human-computer interaction in scientific collaborations) computer-supported cooperative work and cyberinfrastructure visualization visual analytics eye tracking Dr. Aragon's current research focuses on how technology and visual interfaces mediate distributed scientific collaboration, and 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 Awards: In 2009, 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 four Best Paper awards since 2004. She was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine. Publications: Over 30 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 July 2009, her articles have been cited over 1700 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, 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 current 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 Computational Research Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory One Cyclotron Road, MS 50B-2239 Berkeley, California 94720 (510) 486-4106 (tel) (510) 486-5812 (fax) Projects and Groups: Advanced Computing for Science Visualization Group Nearby Supernova Factory NERSC Analytics Deep Sky Particle Data Group