Teaching Assistant Professor Jill Naiman has received a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellowship from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). The fellowship is part of a $2 million endowment from Jerry Fiddler and Melissa Alden to the University of Illinois in support of the Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media (eDream) Institute at NCSA.
Naiman was selected for the Fiddler Fellowship due to her "outstanding interdisciplinary research and successful collaborations with NCSA." She serves as a visiting scholar at the NCSA and has been invited to join the center as a faculty affiliate.
"I have collaborated with members of the NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL), including publishing a few papers about data visualization," she said. "Being a faculty affiliate will allow me to continue in this capacity and expand our sharing of visualization techniques through publications and as open-source code development. I'd like to use part of my fellowship funds to work on a project with an AVL member doing qualitative research, where we hope to complement it with quantitative methods, looking into how audiences learn information in different ways."
Naiman earned her PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed National Science Foundation and Institute of Theory and Computation postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics before coming to the University of Illinois.