Melanie Tory is the director of Data Visualization Research at the Roux Institute, Northeastern University. Her team focuses on empowering people to do more with data through the design and evaluation of novel visualization techniques, human-data interactions, and technology interfaces. She focuses on visualizations for health and engineering applications, and the interplay between visualization and AI, in alignment with other priority research areas at the Roux.

In her previous role at Tableau, Melanie managed an applied user research team that studied natural language interaction with visualizations, ultimately commercialized as Tableau’s Ask Data feature. She also worked as a faculty member in visualization at the University of Victoria, where she explored topics such as collaborative and personal visual analytics.

Melanie earned her doctorate in computer science from Simon Fraser University and her Bachelor of Science from the University of British Columbia. She is associate editor of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, and Computer Graphics Forum.

In her free time, Melanie enjoys outdoor sports like hiking and kayaking.