Saturday, February 28, 2015

Lynn Cherny is joining UM for a year as a Visiting Knight Chair

OK, this hasn't been officially announced yet, but the word is out and spreading fast, and I'm very excited, so here it goes: Lynn Cherny is joining the School of Communication at the University of Miami for a year as a Visiting Knight Chair (there will be another Knight Chair at the School, a more permanent one: Myself.)

As you probably know, Lynn is very active in the visualization world: She tweets, has a blog, consults, and runs the data-vis-jobs list. She's also an expert programmer with a background in linguistics, data mining and analysis, and UX.

During the Fall 2015 and the Spring 2016 semesters, Lynn will play a key role in shaping our new data visualization MFA program (more details here.) To begin with, in the Fall semester this year she's scheduled to teach an advanced data visualization class, which students in my current introductory course can take. For that class, we are partnering with UNICEF to visualize their data. UNICEF will publish the interactive graphics that students in Lynn's class will produce.*

(Another big visualization-related hire may happen soon, but it hasn't been confirmed; stay tuned.)

*Side note: I am going to audit Lynn's class myself. I need to take advantage of this, don't I?