Penny Rheingans

Penny Rheingans is Professor and Director of the School of Computing and Information Sciences at the University of Maine. She has established an internationally recognized research program supported by over $10,500,000 in external funding as PI or CoPI, including the NSF CAREER award. Dr. Rheingans has over eighty peer-reviewed publications, including the NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges report, published in 2006 by IEEE. Dr. Rheingans co-chaired the papers program for Eurovis 2013 (Leipzig, Germany) and 2014 (Swansea, Wales), the premier European visualization publication venue, and co-founded the IEEE Vis/Infovis/VAST Doctoral Colloquium to provide mentoring to PhD candidates in visualization at the annual conference. She served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Graphics. She served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), where she has led the authoring of a Best Practices Memo on teaching faculty and co-chaired the planning committees for Snowbird 2020 (cancelled) and 2022. In 2020, she was inducted into the Visualization Academy. Her current research interests include the visualization of data important to increasing student success, visualization of predictive models, visualization of data with variability or uncertainty, perceptual and illustration issues in visualization, computing education, and broadening participation in computing. Previously, she was Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (CSEE) and Director of the Center for Women in Technology (CWIT) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In 2012, Dr. Rheingans was awarded the University System Maryland (USM) Regents Mentoring Award. She received a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and an AB in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Awards

NSF Career Award, Visualization Academy

Research Interests

• Data visualization
• Computing education
• Broadening participation in computing