Fernanda Viégas

Engineering & Computer Science
Sally Starling Seaver Professor, Harvard Radcliffe Institute; and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Photo courtesy of Fernanda Viégas

Fernanda Viégas is Sally Starling Seaver Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is also affiliated with Harvard Business School.

Viégas is a pioneer in data visualization and analytics known for her contributions to social and collaborative visualization through the creation of open-source tools. With her longtime collaborator, Martin Wattenberg, she coleads Google’s People + AI Research (PAIR) initiative, which advances the research and design of people-centric AI systems. Together, they founded the visualization studio Flowing Media, Inc., and led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the public visualization platform Many Eyes.

Viégas earned her PhD in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Her visualization-based artwork, created with Wattenberg, has been exhibited worldwide and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.