Catherine Plaisant

Catherine Plaisant is a research scientist at the University of Maryland, College Parkand assistant director of research of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab.

Catherine Plaisant completed her PhD in Industrial Engineering at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France. She also earned a Diplôme d'Ingénieur from Arts et Métiers ParisTech (one of the French Grandes écoles).

After five years working at the fr: Centre mondial informatique et ressource humaine in Paris Catherine Plaisant joins the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab to work with Ben Shneiderman.

Catherine Plaisant is known for her work on human-computer Interaction and information visualization. She contributed to the early development of touchscreen interfaces. For example, her work is cited in the lock screen (or "slide to unlock") patent litigation, which cites in particular her 1991 video of a touchscreen slider. She also contributed to the development of Treemap ( in particular Treemap 4.0 ) and Lifelines, a visualization of personal records - such as Patient Records. Current work deals with visual analytics tools for exploring patterns of temporal event sequences, with projects such as LifeLines2and EventFlow that enable analysts to find patterns in large databases of patient records, student records or customer records.

Catherine Plaisant was elected to the ACM CHI Academy in 2015, for her contributions to Human-Computer Interaction. Her work has been cited more than 23,000 times.

• Designing the User Interface Pearson by Shneiderman, B. and Plaisant, C. - 4th Edition (2005) and 5th Edition (2010), ISBN 978-0-32153735-5.