October 1 - - EVL Director of Research Andrew Johnson has been named Interim Director of EVL following Maxine Brown’s retirement from UIC. Johnson now assumes the responsibility of heading EVL - overseeing EVL’s overall mission in education, research, development, and technology transfer.

For over 23 years, Johnson has been a valued EVL faculty member (Professor of Computer Science) and researcher who has focused upon interaction and collaboration using advanced visualization displays and the application of those displays to enhance discovery and learning.

His areas of expertise include visualization, virtual and augmented reality, natural language processing, visual analytics, and high-performance networking.

Over the years, Johnson has been instrumental in the development of EVL instrumentation and systems, including the Continuum smart environment, CAVE2™, LambdaVision high-resolution tiled displays, LambdaTable tabletop touch system, GeoWall portable geoscience display environment, PARIS augmented reality and ImmersaDesk virtual reality systems. He has overseen the development of numerous visualization and virtual reality applications across diverse domain disciplines from science and engineering to the humanities and art. Johnson is a highly regarded mentor and educator to EVL’s graduate students and undergraduates alike.

Johnson retains his position as Director of Research while leading EVL’s future initiatives and innovations as Interim Director.