Katy Williams
I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Davidson College. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona in May 2023. I previously worked in the HDC lab with Kate Isaacs and Alex Bigelow. My research is in data visualization, a creative side of computer science where I can learn about interesting datasets while also building beautiful charts and graphs to aid understanding of the data. As part of my research, I have built visualizations for technical, high-performance computing data and have also published work on people’s sketches of data and how they think about a dataset. My research involves thinking about how people think about data. I like questions such as “What if instead of imagining your data as abstraction X, you tried abstraction Y?” and “In your opinion, what is the most interesting part of the data?”
I strive to make computer science an inclusive, welcoming environment by mentoring women+ in CS, hosting department-wide social events, and leading the Student Volunteers at the IEEE VIS Conference.
Before attending the University of Arizona in the August 2017, I graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina with a B.S. in Computer Science and a Math minor. I was a Division I swimmer in college and swam at the 2016 Olympic Trials in the 100m and 200m breaststrokes. I like to make swim visualizations in my free time, like plotting Caeleb Dressel’s accelerations.