The Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Cecilia Aragon has joined its faculty. Cecilia arrived on campus in September 2010. She will be working part-time during Autumn 2010 and Winter 2011,but you will see her around Sieg and campus as she plans to be in Seattle with some regularity! She has already launched some research projects and is working with UW students. She starts full time in Spring 2011. Cecilia's work in HCDE is supported by the eScience Institute at the UW. Aragon is also adjunct faculty in Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School.

Aragon has been a Staff Scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2005. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Her current research focuses on scientist-computer interaction, a subfield of human-computer interaction, and she is interested in how social media and new methods of computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice. She has developed novel visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has authored or co-authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, visualization, visual analytics, image processing, machine learning, cyberinfrastructure, and astrophysics.

Aragon's work on the Sunfall data visualization and workflow management system for the Nearby Supernova Factory helped advance the study of supernovae in order to reduce the statistical uncertainties on key cosmological parameters that categorize dark energy, one of the grand challenges in physics today. Her early research was in theoretical computer science and analysis of algorithms. She is the co-inventor of a data structure, the treap, which has been commended for its elegance and efficiency, and is now widely used in production applications ranging from wireless networking to memory allocation to fast parallel aggregate set operations. She has received many awards for her research, including the 2008 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and four Best Paper awards since 2004, and has given over 100 invited talks. She was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine.

Aragon has an interdisciplinary background, including over 15 years of software development and management experience in industry and a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company. Aragon has also taught undergraduate and graduate courses at UC Berkeley, developed and taught a year-long algebra class for 8th graders, and has worked every year with graduate and undergraduate students while holding her position at Berkeley Lab, resulting in student co-authorship on six publications. She is also active in program service and the support of diversity in computing; she is the current chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee, 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, a founding member of Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council, and has served as a reviewer and program committee member for numerous computer science conferences.