Cecilia R. Aragon

Dr. Cecilia R. Aragon has been a Staff Scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2005, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Her current research focuses on scientist-computer interaction, a subfield of human-computer interaction, specifically computer-supported cooperative work for scientific collaborations. She is interested in how social media and new methods of computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice. She has developed novel visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has authored or co-authored over 30 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, visualization, image processing, machine learning, and physics.

In 2008, Aragon won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. She was recognized for "seminal research in workflow management and visual analytics for data-intensive scientific research." She has received many other awards for her research, including four Best Paper awards since 2004, and was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine. Her work on the Sunfall data visualization and workflow management system for the Nearby Supernova Factory helped advance the study of supernovae in order to reduce the statistical uncertainties on key cosmological parameters that categorize dark energy, one of the grand challenges in physics today.

Dr. Aragon has an interdisciplinary background, including over 15 years of software development experience in industry and NASA, and a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company. She is also active in supporting diversity in computing. She is a founding member of Latinas in Computing, a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), a founding member of Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council, the current chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee, and has served as a reviewer and program committee member for numerous computer science conferences.