People Lab Members Francesca Samsel, M.F.A. Francesca Samsel, trained as an artist, focuses on multidisciplinary collaborations with visualization and climate scientists. Her work blends the languages of art and climate science in order to speak in a human voice about our rapidly changing planet. A decade ago, her artistic career morphed into a blend of the artistic practice and environmental science via an artist-in-residence at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is a regular speaker at conferences such as AGU Fall meeting and IEEE Visualizations Conferences and has an extensive publication record. Currently, she is a research scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin where she works with multi-disciplinary teams, creating an artistically-driven visual vocabulary for scientific visualization, and understanding the connective role of data physicalization plays in climate communication. Samsel’s blend of artistic practice and collaboration with climate scientists looks at: How might we expand the vocabulary of visualization, providing a greater variety of visual components that may allow for more intuitive interpretation and ease of differentiation between multiple co-located components? How can we incorporate physical media with the virtual, more closely connecting abstracted, digital data with its physical indexes? How can we operationalize metaphor to provide entry points into the analysis of large data climate simulations? Our artistic practice couples climate models with artistic vocabulary applied to data and contextualized with data physicalization and material metaphors and interactive technology. Greg Abram, Ph.D Greg joined the Texas Advanced Computing Center in August 2009. He is a key employee in Research and Development in large-data scientific visualization. Before coming to TACC, he worked at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Science Collaborators Facilities Associated Groups and Institutions
