Michael Correll

About

I am a research scientist with a background in visualization. My focus areas are statistical communication, graphical perception, and text analytics. I am interested in how visualizations can be used to persuade, and how to make audiences mindful of biases and uncertainty in their data. I am also active in the digital humanities community, where I look at how we can create visualizations of text data that allow complex statistical modeling but are also easy to explain to audiences without backgrounds in statistics.  Prior to Tableau, I was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Washington, where I worked with Jeffrey Heer investigating how well people can estimate aggregate statistics from visualizations. I received my PhD. In Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Michael Gleicher. My thesis work was on creating and evaluating visualizations for presenting statistical information to wider audiences. As part of that work, I developed custom visualizations tools for users in a wide range of fields, such as genomics and literary criticism.