Shirley Wu

Shirley Wu is a data scientist specialized in data art and data visualizations. She is a freelancer based out of San Francisco, California. With Nadieh Bremer, Wu is the author of Data Sketches.

Education Shirley Wu graduated from Newbury Park High School in Newbury Park, California in 2008. Wu received her Business Administration degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012.

Career In 2012, Wu worked as a software engineer at Splunk.

Since 2016, Wu has freelanced as a data visualization contractor and consultant. as well as providing courses on front-end web development, particularly D3. As a data visualization expert, she is a frequent speaker at conferences and guest on data visualization podcasts.

Wu has had an ongoing collaboration with Nadieh Bremer since they met in 2016 at the OpenVisConf in Boston. In late 2017, Wu and Bremer collaborated with The Guardian to enrich the field of journalism research in the project "Bussed Out: How America Moves its Homeless". The pair have collaborated with Google and Alberto Cairo on visualizations about popular travel locations and searches. Bremer and Wu have also co-authored the book Data Sketches together. An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton, The Pudding (part of the Data Sketches series). An interactive data visualization of the dialogue in the musical Hamilton. Explore Adventure, Google News Lab (part of the Data Sketches series). The visualization explores how Google searches differ between countries. In 2017, it received the Science & Technology award given by Information is Beautiful Awards. People of the Pandemic: an interactive simulation game. This piece allows readers to localize a simulation of the COVID-19 pandemic, to make the impacts of decisions more intuitive. Bussed Out: How America Moves its Homeless, The Guardian for "Bussed Out: How America Moves its Homeless". Silver in Features – Malofiej 26 (2018) for "Bussed Out: How America Moves its Homeless". for "An Interactive Visualization of Every Line in Hamilton". for "Data Sketches in Twelve Installments".