Congratulations to SCI alum Juliana Freire who has been honored as an AAAS lifetime fellow.

In a tradition stretching back to 1874, the AAAS Council elects as Fellows a distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers, and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines. The 2021 class of AAAS Fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 disciplines.

The organization cites Freire’s distinguished contributions to the development of widely used systems embodying novel data and provenance management methods to support usability, reproducibility, and trust for data-driven exploration. A member and co-founder of the Visualization Imaging and Data Analysis Center (VIDA) at NYU Tandon, Freire has co-authored over 200 technical papers (including 11 award-winning publications), developed several open-source systems, and holds 12 U.S. patents.

Freire’s research focuses on methods and systems that empower a range of users — not just experts in data and computer science to obtain trustworthy insights from data. This spans topics in large-scale data analysis and integration, visualization, machine learning, provenance management, and web information discovery, and different application areas, including urban analytics, predictive modeling, and computational reproducibility.

A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), she was awarded the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award in 2020. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Energy, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, W. M. Keck Foundation, Google, Amazon, AT&T Research, Microsoft Research, Yahoo! and IBM, among others.