This award funds a new CISE REU Site to provide a novel approach to broadening participation in visualization, while accelerating discovery and progress. Visualization plays a significant role in the exploration and understanding of data across all disciplines with a universal goal: gaining insight into the complex relationships that exist within the data. A multi-disciplinary team of faculty and visualization staff plans to establish a site that focuses on research across several domains including Computer Science, Genetics and Biochemistry, Geophysics, Sociology, Molecular Modeling and Simulation, Inorganic Chemistry, Social Media, Parks Recreation Tourism Management, Biological Sciences, and Digital Humanities.
The overall objectives of the REU Site are to broaden participation in visualization, to explore visualization jointly with research projects while accelerating discovery and progress, and to utilize visualization as a conduit for collaboration. The REU Site achieves these objectives by: exploring visualization in parallel with research, involving students directly in data-driven visualization with an interdisciplinary aspect, providing training in tools and technologies that are common in visualization research, inspiring students to consider visualization as a career path and pursue visualization at the graduate level, and targeting participation of women and underrepresented groups, as well as students from institutions with limited cyberinfrastructure resources.