Dr. Meyer obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University in 1999, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah in 2008. From 2008 until 2011 she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. During her last year at Harvard she was also a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Meyer is currently an assistant professor in the School of Computing and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.
Dr. Meyer's research focuses on designing systems that help people make sense of heterogeneous data. Recently she's been developing visualization tools for biological data that allow scientists to integrate together data with different structures and coming from different sources, including from computational models. These tools allow biologists to validate their data and models, and they also provide insights that lead to new hypotheses and experiments as well as ideas for more informative computational models.
Dr. Meyer takes a problem-driven approach to research, working on focused projects with specific scientific questions. This ensures that the visualization systems she designs are effective for allowing her collaborates to answer their scientific questions. Moreover, these focused projects serve as a scaffolding for addressing deeper visualization issues, such as methodology and the generalization of new visual representations and system design patterns.