Cecilia Aragon

Biography

Cecilia Aragon is Director of the Human Centered Data Science Lab, Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, and Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. In 2016, Aragon became the first Latina to be named to the rank of Full Professor in the College of Engineering at UW in its hundred-year history. Her research focuses on human-centered data science, an emerging field at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and the statistical and computational techniques of data science.

Aragon has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and over 130 other publications in the areas of HCI, CSCW, data science, visual analytics, machine learning, and astrophysics. Her book using human-centered data science to study distributed mentoring, youth, and fanfiction, Writers in the Secret Garden, co-authored with Katie Davis, was published by MIT Press in August 2019. Aragon is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the US government on outstanding scientists in the early stages of their careers.

Specializations

Human-Centered Data Science

• Visual Analytics / Visualization and Machine Learning
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Computer-Supported Cooperative Work / Social Computing
• Data Science and Big Data

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science, 2004
  University of California, Berkeley
• M.S., Computer Science
  University of California, Berkeley
• B.S. with Honors, Mathematics
  California Institute of Technology