Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


CIFellow Miriah Meyer Named to TR35

August 23rd, 2011 / in awards, CIFellows / by Erwin Gianchandani

TR35: Miriah Meyer, University of UtahCongratulations to Miriah Meyer, one of our 2009 Computing Innovation Fellows — and now faculty at the University of Utah’s School of Computing — who was just named to the Technology Review‘s annual list of 35 Innovators Under 35!

Here’s the TR35 write-up for Miriah:

Biological research is exploding with genomic, molecular, and chemical data. But analyzing all that information has been difficult and slow, in part because biologists haven’t had good ways to visualize the data — to see it represented graphically on screen so as to help them spot trends and make comparisons. University of Utah computer science professor Miriah Meyer is addressing that problem by developing programs that make it easier for scientists to explore the data they’re generating. For instance, Meyer has built an interactive program that lets researchers compare different organisms’ genomes, which is useful for understanding evolutionary trends. Scientists also benefit when something doesn’t look right on the screen, because that can reveal a mistake in their data that might otherwise take months to uncover.

 

Although custom visualization tools are used in many other fields, such as economics, computer science, and engineering, they have been surprisingly slow to spread to biology, says Angela DePace, a biologist at Harvard who has collaborated with Meyer. “More often than not, biologists make do with out-of-the-box solutions that are difficult to tailor to their needs,” she says. That tailoring is just what Meyer tries to do. She spends months working with scientists to understand the specifics of their projects — and how a graphical representation can help.

Congrats, Miriah!

You can read about all the other fabulous 2011 TR35 Young Innovators here.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

CIFellow Miriah Meyer Named to TR35