Amy Rae Fox

Amy Rae Fox is a METEOR and School of Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research centers on the role of cognition in information visualization and diagrammatic reasoning. At MIT, Amy is investigating interactive visualization to address a central challenge in visualization research and design: the common belief that extracting insights from visual data is easy when, in fact, we rely on years of explicit training and implicit exposure. Amy’s doctoral research examined the integration of perceptual and knowledge-driven processing in graphical discovery—an often-neglected stage of graph comprehension that characterizes how humans construct meaning for unfamiliar graphs. The goal of her postdoctoral work is to lay the groundwork for a generalized theory of interaction through mixed-method research. This theory will support her future efforts to leverage what we know about human cognition when building information systems and artifacts and, conversely, to study their everyday use to advance theories of human cognition. As visualization becomes a central medium for communication and decision-making, Amy’s work has the potential for significant social impact, from scientific research and data analysis to personal decisions about our health and well-being.