Jillian Aurisano, a UIC Computer Science (CS) PhD student and Research Assistant in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), was a recipient of the 2015 UIC Chancellor’s Graduate Research Award. This award supports graduate students’ multidisciplinary scholarship and exposure to varied research and creative fields. Aurisano’s research is in information and scientific visualization, visual analytics, computer graphics, and bioinformatics. The award, announced November 23, 2015, provides funding of up to $4,000 per year for up to two years to supplement students’ existing stipends.

After receiving her undergraduate degree in biology, Aurisano became interested in analyzing large biological datasets using computational methods, and came to UIC as a CS graduate student. Aurisano, whose MS/PhD advisor is CS Associate Professor and EVL Director of Research Andy Johnson, did her MS thesis on the visual analysis of large volumes of complete bacterial genome sequences using high-resolution tiled display walls.

For the Chancellor’s Graduate Research Award and her PhD research, Aurisano wants to extend her current work on scalable visual designs for biological datasets on large displays. Inspired by discussions with EVL collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory and the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education (C-MORE) at University of Hawai’i at Manoa, she wants to explore new approaches to visualize genome-scale metabolic network simulation data and to display multiple, linked views on high-resolution displays.

See the full list of winners of the Fall 2015 Chancellor’s Graduate Research Award. More information on BactoGeNIE.