The 2020 Visualization Career Award Catherine Plaisant The 2020 VGTC Visualization Career Award goes to Catherine Plaisant for her comprehensive body of work within the field of data visualization, including her contributions to evaluation, benchmarks, case studies, and her specific research focus on event sequence visualization. Catherine Plaisant is a Senior Research Scientist at the Catherine Plaisant Institute for Advanced Computer Studies of the University University of Maryland, USA of Maryland, USA. She is the Associate Director of Research of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) Award Recipient 2020 and holds an International Chair at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). advances were made to the visualization of event patterns In 2015 Plaisant was elected a fellow of the ACM CHI in collections of records, culminating in methods for Academy, and in 2020 she received the ACM SIGCHI explainable recommendations. During her entire career Lifetime Service Award. Catherine strived to create interfaces that truly answer Plaisant received an industrial engineering PhD at the the needs of real users, receiving best paper awards from Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris in 1982. Her diverse organizations including the American Medical first close encounter with computers was during her PhD Informatics Association and the Transportation Research thesis, building from scratch a voice recognition system for Board. quadraplegic users with little or no mobility to control Plaisant wrote highly cited papers on the topic of devices around them. Her first position was at the “Centre evaluation. She co-chaired the 1st Information Mondial Informatique et Ressources Humaines” (CMI) in Visualization competition in 2003, spearheaded the Beliv Paris, conducting research on early educational systems (BEyond time and errors: novel evaluation methods for for young children. Many of the CMI researchers came Information Visualization) workshop in 2004. She was a from US labs, and one of them convinced her to cross the contributor to the National Visual Analytics Center Atlantic. She joined the University of Maryland in 1988. Research Agenda regarding evaluation needs and goals, Her 70 journal articles, 116 conference papers, 15 book and subsequently co-chaired the first Visual Analytics chapters and 3 books are the main products of her Challenge in 2006. Both Beliv and the VAST Challenge research. She coauthored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th, remain successful ongoing events at VIS. 5th and 6th editions of Designing the User Interface. She Like all modern academic researchers, Catherine’s has delivered keynotes at a dozen conferences, advised 35 successful career is the product of teamwork. First and students, and has been principal investigator of more than foremost, Ben Shneiderman’s early mentoring, continuing 40 successful grants and contracts. encouragements, and unwavering energy have been a Early focus at HCIL was on hypertext and touchscreen tremendous motor of productivity and led to 34 years of interfaces (which have been influential to the design of collaboration. Almost half of Catherine’s papers were co- current mobile interfaces). Visualization innovations authored with Ben. Catherine is also forever grateful to all revolved around Dynamic Queries, such as interactive the smart and dedicated graduate students and maps for the National Center for Health Statistics, or researchers who worked with her. Nurturing the Query Previews to allow Dynamic Queries to handle the supportive work culture at HCIL remains one of her vast directories of NASA scientific datasets. Query central activities, and she also now enjoys the creative Previews became the precursor of faceted search environment of the INRIA AVIZ lab in Paris – when novel interfaces, now commonplace in ecommerce websites. viruses don’t interfere. While very diverse, many of Plaisant’s contributions have centered around the visualization of temporal event sequences. For example, LifeLines was designed to analyze individual personal records using interactive timelines. LifeLines has inspired a generation of designers dealing with historical data with applications in medicine, transportation, or customer relations. Subsequently, and working mostly with clinical researchers, a series of xxviii.