Chris North

Chris North is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He is the associate director of the Sanghani Center and leads the Visual Analytics research group. He is the principal architect of the GigaPixel Display Laboratory, one of the most advanced display and interaction facilities in the world. He also works with Virginia Tech’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Hume Center for National Security, and is a member of the Department of Homeland Security-supported VACCINE Visual Analytics Center of Excellence.

He has served as general co-chair of IEEE VisWeek 2009, and as papers chair of the IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis) and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Conferences. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), the Information Visualization journal, and Foundations and Trends in HCI.

He has been awarded over $6M in grants; co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications; and delivered three keynote addresses at symposia in the field. He has graduated eight Ph.D. and 14 M.S. thesis students, four of whom received outstanding research awards at Virginia Tech; and advised more than 70 undergraduate research students including several award winners at Virginia Tech’s annual undergraduate research symposium.

His research seeks to enable people to interactively visualize and explore big data for discovering new insights, by establishing usable, effective, and scientifically grounded methods for visual interaction. His current research themes focus on creating powerful interactions for computational analytics that respond to human cognitive sense making activity, and exploiting large high-resolution displays to create rich embodied-interactive spaces.

He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park.  He received a B.S. in computer science and mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.