Barbara Mirel is a visiting associate professor and research investigator at the University of Michigan where she teaches information visualization. Recently she has worked as a senior manager of human factors at a data visualization software company, a Member of the Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies, and Director of User Experience at Scient Corp. With teammates, she holds a patent for Visual Discovery design. Barbara is the recipient of numerous research grants for usability studies and has worked as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies across the country.