Draft:Michelle Borkin

Michelle Borkin is a computer scientist and researcher known for her work in data visualization theory such as memorability and taxonomies, and applications of visualizations in astronomy, medicine, and other scientific fields. She is an assistant professor at Northeastern University and co-founder of Glue (software).

Early life and education
Borkin was born in Massachusetts. She pursued her undergraduate degree at Harvard University, obtaining a B.A. in Astrophysics. She then earned her M.S. and her Ph.D. in Applied Physics, also at Harvard, advised by Hanspeter Pfister and Alyssa A. Goodman. Her doctoral dissertation in 2014 was titled "Perception, Cognition, and Effectiveness of Visualizations with Applications in Science and Engineering". . She served as a research fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Borkin completed her post-doc at the University of British Columbia under the advisement of Tamara Munzner.

Career
Dr. Borkin joined Northeastern University as assistant professor of computer science in 2015, creating the InterVis lab in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. In 2021, she was awarded the IEEE Visualization Visualization Significant New Researcher award for "for her work on visualization memorability, visualization evaluation methods, and their application to astrophysics and medicine". In 2022, she was awarded tenure and promoted to an associate professor at Northeastern.

She has supervised her doctoral students on research such as likert scales, photosensitive epilepsy , visualization pedagogy , tree-structured data , brain imaging , augmented reality for astrophysics , and genomics.

Research
Borkin's research interests span multiple fields, and she has published numerous papers in data visualization and computer science. She is best known for her work in visualizing complex scientific data, with notable contributions to the field of medical imaging and astronomical data analysis. In 2012, she presented a TED (conference) talk entitled "Can Astronomers Help Doctors?" and coined the term "astronomical medicine" to describe how spatial computing and visualization solutions for astronomers could have applications in 3D modeling for doctors.

Awards and honors

 * National Science Foundation graduate research fellow
 * National Defense Science and Engineering graduate fellow
 * TED fellow
 * CHI 2020 Best Paper Award
 * IEEE VGTC Visualization Significant New Researcher Award

Selected publications

 * "What makes a visualization memorable?" MA Borkin, AA Vo, Z Bylinskii, P Isola, S Sunkavalli, A Oliva, H Pfister IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 19 (12), 2306-2315. 2013.
 * "Beyond memorability: Visualization recognition and recall" Michelle A Borkin, Zoya Bylinskii, Nam Wook Kim, Constance May Bainbridge, Chelsea S Yeh, Daniel Borkin, Hanspeter Pfister, Aude Oliva. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 22 (1), 519-528. 2015.
 * "Evaluation of artery visualizations for heart disease diagnosis". Michelle Borkin, Krzysztof Gajos, Amanda Peters, Dimitrios Mitsouras, Simone Melchionna, Frank Rybicki, Charles Feldman, Hanspeter Pfister. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 17 (12), 2479-2488. 2011.
 * "Design study lite methodology: Expediting design studies and enabling the synergy of visualization pedagogy and social good". UH Syeda, P Murali, L Roe, B Berkey, MA Borkin. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2020.
 * "Glue: Linked data visualizations across multiple files". C Beaumont, T Robitaille, M Borkin. Astrophysics Source Code Library, ascl: 1402.002. 2014.

Volunteer work
Dr. Borkin has volunteered extensively in the visualization and Human–computer interaction communities, most notably with the Vis4SocialGood workshop at IEEE VIS and the Massachusetts Avenue (metropolitan Boston) Coalition