Tamara Munzner


Tamara Macushla Munzner is an American-Canadian scientist. She is an expert in information visualization who works as a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia.
Munzner earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991, then worked at The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota from 1991 to 1995. There, she helped produce two mathematical visualization videos, one about turning spheres inside-out and another about the different topological structures that a three-dimensional universe could have. She returned to Stanford for her graduate studies, completing her Ph.D. in 2000 under the supervision of Pat Hanrahan. Her thesis research involved using hyperbolic geometry to visualize large graphs. She then became a research scientist at the Compaq Systems Research Center, before joining the UBC faculty in 2002.
Munzner is the author of the book Visualization Analysis and Design. She was program co-chair of the InfoVis conference in 2003 and 2004, and of EuroVis in 2009 and 2010. Since 2012 she has been the chair of the executive committee of IEEE Visualization, the umbrella event for InfoVis. She was a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2013.