Melanie Tory hopes to build data visualization for impact at the Roux Institute
Author: Kelly Chan
Date: 11.04.21
Melanie Tory strives to create real-world impact—a goal that led her to the Roux Institute at Northeastern University. Here, she’s taking on a brand-new role as director of data visualization research.
Appointed in May, Tory aims to lead and collaborate on projects that will affect change for the institute’s partner organizations, and to realize the Roux’s mission of fostering innovation and generating economic prosperity to the region.
Melanie Tory. Photo by Alyssa Stone, Northeastern University.
“I want people to think of the Roux Institute as the place for data viz research — where they can do research that has real impact in the world, that is right at the forefront of the field, and that is also very relevant to outside organizations that they get to work with,” Tory said. “My vision is to grow this team and bring it visibility and impact in the world.”
Tory’s expertise lies in both research and teaching. For nine years, she taught as a faculty member at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and up until this past May, she worked at Tableau Software in Palo Alto, California.
“I’ve always been at the boundary between academia and industry,” Tory said. “When I was a professor before, I felt like a bit of an imposter, in teaching students how to do software engineering when I hadn’t actually done it myself. I really wanted to do something that would allow me to have more real-world experience and to see how the sausage got made in industry, so that got me to Tableau.”
Her love for impact-driven work then solidified at Tableau. For much of her career, Tory’s work was purely research-focused until she worked on a project at Tableau with the goal of making data visualization more accessible to non-experts. This involved building a product prototype and getting feedback directly from the public, shifting her role from an academic researcher to an applied user researcher.
“The work I was doing was no longer for the purpose of writing publications but instead to figure out how to make that product work in practice. That was a big shift [in my career],” she said. “It forced me to learn a lot more about how software gets made … and how I could use those same research skills I had in a different way and in a different context to bring value to a product.”
She believes her new directorship is the culmination of her past experiences, as she’s found herself back at an academic institution, but this time with a focus on industry impact.
“I like to push the boundaries of my field and do things that are new and novel, but also I really care about solving problems that matter to people in the world. I want to see the results of my work make it into the hands of people who can use them.”
Before Tory found her love for data visualization, she was a microbiology major at the University of British Columbia and completed co-ops related to microbiology and chemistry. Though she realized her aversion to wet lab work, Tory discovered that she enjoyed manipulating and analyzing her data. Thus, after graduating with her undergraduate degree in biology, Tory decided to pursue her doctorate in computer science at Simon Fraser University.
To her, the best part about data visualization is how it intersects, and benefits, those in other fields of study.
“I approach visualization from the discipline of computer science, but it also draws on all kinds of other things, like design, cognitive science, and psychology,” Tory said. “You can apply data to any other field, so when I go into a design study, I get to learn about a discipline that I never knew about before, like construction management or engineering. In a way, I never had to pick a discipline because I always get to be learning about new ones.”
She particularly emphasizes the significance of psychology when creating data visualizations, since they serve to help the public consume information in ways that are best suited for them.
“The human side is the most important part of the equation,” she said. “It’s the reason we build visualization tools—to enable humans. We have to understand how humans behave and how they work and design to fit that, rather than expect people to change to fit the tool.”
Currently, Tory is in the process of building a research team. She envisions her lab to be inherently collaborative, thriving off working with others, especially those in other domains. Her lab at the Roux will also be more applied than a traditional academic lab and more akin to an industry research lab, where “the measurements of success are less about the number of grants, research papers published, and patents, and more about the amount of impact that we have on partners and the topics that they care about.”
Her main active project now is in partnership with Northeastern’s PROTECT Project, which examines the effects of environmental contaminants on preterm birth in Puerto Rico. Through visualization, Tory and Liudas Panavas, a doctoral student from the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, are transforming the data to inform the project’s researchers.
At the same time, she is brainstorming future projects, such as exploring the intersection of visualization and artificial intelligence as well as creating “situated visualizations.” The latter are designed to fit the context of a place, whether it be a factory floor or a home, so that users can interact with them more effectively.
Looking back on her career thus far, Tory is grateful for those she’s met along her professional journey and believes they are the reason for her growth.
“The visualization field is special because it is so collaborative. All of the people who I’ve interacted with in my field are excited to work on things together and are very supportive of each other,” she said. “It’s an amazing community to be part of, and I attribute a lot of my success to the support of that whole research community.”