Jane Adams

(she/her/hers)

PhD Student

Jane Adams
  • Data visualization
  • Network science
  • Exploratory data analysis
  • Complex systems
  • Emergent media art
  • Information visualization
  • Machine learning
  • Computational creativity
  • MFA in Emergent Media, Champlain College
  • BFA in Graphic Design and Digital Media, Champlain College

Jane Adams is a doctoral student in the Data Visualization Lab at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, advised by Michelle Borkin. Her doctoral research, which she began in 2021 and expects to complete in 2027, focuses on data visualization.

Adams is an emergent media artist whose graduate work involved curating data-driven art exhibits, writing about the evolving relationship between art and science, and building computer-aided interactive, illuminated, and hydroponic sculptural works. This work provided a bridge into computer science, where she typically works in full-stack MERN web development, D3/JS, and Python. For her art projects, Java, C++, and generative adversarial networks come in handy.

Adams’ broad research interest is visualization for exploratory analysis of high-dimension data. In particular, she works on Glue, a NASA- and NSF-funded data visualization project wherein Adams implements visual analytics tools for spotting neurological anomalies in radiology imaging via planar graph embedding of vasculature. Before joining Khoury College, Adams worked as a research analyst at the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center, where she dealt with Twitter/Reddit natural language processing and visualization, as well as exploratory analysis for life insurance underwriting and public health analysis.

Currently, Adams is a visiting scholar at the Jackson Laboratory where she works alongside computational biologists to develop visualization tools for exploratory analysis of systems genetics data. She is affiliated with Data Visualization and the Northeastern University Visualization Consortium, and is a PhD Fellowship Recipient. She has been a featured speaker, panelist, or instructor at numerous computer-science-based and art-based conferences in Vermont, Massachusetts, and California, and was a workshop organizer at IEEE VIS 2020 and 2021.