Change what we can see. See what we can change.
Change what we can see. See what we can change.
Melanie Tory is Professor of the Practice at 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 is especially focused on visualizations for health and engineering applications, and the interplay between visualization and AI.
In her previous role at Tableau, Melanie managed an applied user research team and conducted research in 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 PhD in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University and her BSc from the University of British Columbia. Tory serves as Overall Papers Co-Chair for IEEE Visualization 2025-26 and has previously served as associate editor for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications and IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics.