Hi there, 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 frameworks for visualization similarity. I’m currently focusing on building a multimodal search engine for genomics visualization retrieval and authoring.

I received my PhD in Computer Science from Texas Tech University, where I developed an interest in interactive data visualization and visual analytics. My doctoral studies focused on interactive time-series visualizations, spanning both quantitative and qualitative data. The primary goal of my research centers on exploring and communicating insights from temporal patterns through interactive visual interfaces. This vision was actualized with the development and rise in popularity of WordStream as a JavaScript library and an end-to-end platform dedicated to visualizing the evolution of topics over time.

I love teaching and have been teaching Data Structures Lab sessions for undergraduate students since 2021. I am looking forward to the day when I get to teach Data Visualization!

When I’m not visualizing stuff, I like writing and walking. I also like playing the ukulele and guitar, and their lovely “mixture” which is the baritone ukulele; although practicing these strings hurt my fingers so bad, the delightful sound is worth the pain somehow. My ukulele tunes can be found somewhere on soundcloud.

…or as I often say, in Vietnamese:

Chào các bạn, tớ là Huyền!