Member Profile: Tamara Munzner
1. What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I’ve been doing visualization research since 1990. I’m now a professor in the department of computer science at the University of British Columbia.
2. What was your first job?
I was a summer intern at ETA Systems, a supercomputer company spinoff from Control Data, for three years starting in 1986.
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
Stanford University: undergrad 1986-1991, and PhD 1995-2000 with Pat Hanrahan.
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
My first real SIGGRAPH was 1992, in Chicago, and I went to most of them for 15 years or so after that.
But I did walk the show floor and see the Electronic Theater in 1984, when SIGGRAPH was in my home town of Minneapolis and I was still in high school. My father Ari Munzner brought me, he was a professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and knew many in the art crowd including Peter Seitz (designer of the iconic logo, also MCAD faculty).
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
When the crowd broke into applause during the screening of our movie Outside In in the Electronic Theater in 1994.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
My YouTube channel has many videos that may be of interest, including playlists with the full set of lectures in my visualization course (nearly 6 hours split across 18 segments), author interviews from the AK Peters Visualization Series from CRC/Routledge that I co-edit (6 so far), videos created at The Geometry Center in the 1990s by both the technical staff and visitors (73 in total), and of course videos showcasing research papers from my own group.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
My mother when she was the same age that I am now, because she was one of the wisest and wittiest people I’ve ever known.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I studied Mandarin for 6 years, through high school and the first two years of college. I picked an undergrad school based on strength in both East Asian studies and computer science. In my third year I realized I didn’t have enough time to continue with both, and that I needed to pick one or the other for my major. After thinking about what it was like to stay up all night memorizing characters, and to stay up all night programming, I liked the programming nights better. So I went with CS.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
Pat Hanrahan, who was my PhD advisor at Stanford. I decided who I wanted to work with in grad school by reading old SIGGRAPH proceedings and noticing whose taste in research I liked and wanted to absorb. Unusually enough we never actually co-authored a paper while I was there, but I learned a huge amount about how to do research from him. Although I’ve moved from computer graphics into visualization, it’s all still relevant.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
No particular person – every computer graphics researcher ever, because it’s at the core of the field.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
Publishing my book
Visualization Analysis and Design
.