Tamara Munzner

Tamara Macushla Munzner (born 1969) is an American-Canadian scientist. She is an expert in information visualization who works as a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia (UBC).

Early life Tamara Macushla Munzner was born in 1969 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the daughter of abstract painter Aribert Munzner. She graduated from South High School in 1986. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from Stanford University in 1991. Her thesis, Interactive Visualization of Large Graphs and Networks, involved using hyperbolic geometry to visualize large graphs.

She interned at Microsoft Research and Silicon Graphics. She was program co-chair of the InfoVis conference in 2003 and 2004, and of EuroVis in 2009 and 2010. She has served as the chair of the steering committee of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) InfoVis and the executive committee of IEEE Visualization. In 2019, Munzner was awarded a 10-Year Test of Time award from IEEE InfoVis. Her nested model of visualization design and validation, published in 2009, guided designers from a problem in an application domain to abstractions for the problem and data, to the design of visual encoding and interaction techniques, to efficient instantiation through algorithms. She was elected as an IEEE Fellow, in the 2023 class of fellows, "for contributions to principles, processes, and design for visualization".