Huyen N. Nguyen

Harvard Medical School
Department of Biomedical Informatics

Welcome!

Hi, I'm Huyen! I'm a Postdoctoral Research Fellow working with Professor Nils Gehlenborg in the HIDIVE Lab in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. The goal of my research is to develop visualization systems that enable scientists and clinicians to efficiently explore and interact with biomedical data. I'm particularly interested in developing infrastructure for visualization retrieval and theoretical frameworks for visualization similarity. I'm currently focusing on building a multimodal search engine for genomics visualization retrieval and authoring.

Before doing research in biomedical informatics, I was a computer scientist by training. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Texas Tech University, with my doctoral study focusing on interactive time-series visualizations. I led the development of the WordStream visualization for topic evolution as an interactive tool, a JavaScript library, and a no-code platform.

I love teaching and taught Data Structures Lab sessions for undergrad students at Texas Tech from 2021 to 2023. I’m looking forward to the day when I get to teach Data Visualization!

My first name, Huyền, is pronounced as /Hoo-ee-en/. Here's how it sounds:

July 2025
My absolute favorite paper to write, "Safire: Similarity Framework for Visualization Retrieval," has been accepted for VIS 2025! See you in Vienna :)
July 2025
I'm delighted to be a speaker at the very first Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on Visualization in Science and Education, presenting "Authoring Made Easier: Why We Built a Search Engine for Genomics Visualizations." I’m also presenting a poster on the same topic during conference week at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC) 2025! 🎉
July 2025
Happy to share that I'll be presenting our new system for searching and authoring genomics data visualizations at BioVis @ ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool on July 24th!
June 2025
Welcome Summer Interns! I will be co-mentoring two undergrad students under the SIBMI and HuBMAP programs.
May 2025
I'm excited to share my latest preprint on Similarity Framework for Visualization Retrieval, focusing on criteria and representation modalities in comparing visualizations!
April 2025
Preprint on ✨ Multimodal Retrieval of Genomics Data Visualizations ✨ is out! Super exciting to bridge multimodal search and authoring for genomics visualizations! 🔎🧬
December 2024
I'm giving a talk on creating and searching genomics data visualizations in a class on 'Epigenetics, Epitranscriptomics, and Gene Regulation' at the Harvard Extension School!
July 2024
We have two full papers accepted at IEEE VIS 2024 🎉 Our paper on Blended Interfaces received 🏆 Best Paper Honorable Mention!
July 2024
We have a presentation at BioVis @ ISMB 2024, titled “Understanding Visualization Authoring for Genomics Data through User Interviews”!
June 2024
Welcome the interns for the Summer Institute in Biomedical Informatics (SIBMI) at HMS! My team and I are excited to work with a student from MIT on curating an accessible dataset for genomics visualizations and benchmarking with LLMs.
September 2023
I started working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School (HMS)!
August 2023
I ✨graduated✨ with my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Texas Tech University 🎓
July 2023
I presented our interdisciplinary work on Visualization for Qualitative Data at GRC 2023. It's been 4 wonderful years working with our NASA Visionary Grant!
June 2023
I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation in Computer Science! ✨ My dissertation is titled "Interactive Visualization and Event Detection in Time-series Data."
Jan 2023
I presented a Guest Lecture at University of Washington Bothell on Interaction in Visualization. Had a great time discussing with colleagues and students on interaction and accessibility in visualization!
Sept 2022
Heading to Oklahoma for IEEE VIS 2022! Our paper of WordStream Maker: A Lightweight End-to-end Visualization Platform for Qualitative Time-series Data was accepted to NLVIZ: Workshop on Natural Language, Text, and Data Visualization.
Sept 2022
Our journal paper of MalView: Interactive Visual Analytics for Comprehending Malware Behavior was accepted to IEEE Access!
Jun 2021
ACM Open Access: Interactive Qualitative Data Visualization for Educational Assessment, the collaboration supported by GRC - NASA Visionary Grant
May 2021
Two new papers accepted at IAIT 2021. One on visualization for education and one on Explainable LSTM for Multivariate Time Series.
Aug 2020
VAST Challenge 2020 🏆 Mini-Challenge 2 Award: Honorable Mention for Detailed Analysis of Patterns of Misclassification.
Nov 2019
NASA, Visionary Grant Award 🥇 administered by Gordon Research Conferences, for interdisciplinary research with “Visualizing Qualitative Data for Science and Education”.

Publications

An up-to-date list is available on Google Scholar