Keynote Speakers
Isabel Meirelles
Professor, Faculty of Design
OCAD University, Toronto, Canada
Isabel Meirelles is a designer and educator whose intellectual curiosity lies in the relationships between visual thinking and visual representation. She is a Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. Prior to her current academic appointment that began in January 2015, Meirelles taught undergraduate and graduate studio and seminar communication design courses at Northeastern University, Boston (2003–2014).
Isabel’s research focuses on the theoretical and experimental examination of the fundamentals underlying how information is structured, represented, and communicated in different media. Meirelles is the author of “Design for Information: An introduction to the histories, theories, and best practices behind effective information visualizations” (Rockport Publishers, 2013).
Isabel studied Architecture and Urban Design at Faculdade de Belas Artes in São Paulo, Brazil. She received two master’s degrees, one in history and theory of architecture at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and the other in communication design from Dynamic Media Institute, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston.
Isabel’s professional experience includes architecture, art, and communication design. She has held positions in São Paulo including chairperson of the Art Education & Public Affairs Department at the MaSP–Museum of Art of São Paulo, the principal art museum in Brazil, and senior design positions at major publishing companies, including one of the largest media holdings in Latin America, Editora Abril. In Boston, Isabel has continued a small design practice that focuses mainly on projects for cultural and nonprofit institutions.
Mary Hegarty
Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of California Santa Barbara
Mary Hegarty received her BA and MA from University College Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a research assistant for three years at the Irish national educational research centre before attending Carnegie Mellon, where she received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1988. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychological & Brain sciences, UCSB since then. The author of over 100 articles and chapters on spatial cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, and individual differences, she is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, a former Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and the former chair of the governing board of the Cognitive Science Society. She is Associate Editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and TopiCS in Cognitive Science and is on the editorial board of Learning and Individual Differences and Spatial Cognition and Computation. Her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Mary Hegarty’s research is on spatial thinking in complex activities such as comprehension, reasoning and problem solving. In research on mechanical reasoning and interpretation of graphics, she uses eye-fixation data to trace the processes involved in understanding visual-spatial displays (diagrams, graphs and maps), and making inferences from these displays. A unique characteristic of her research is that she studies spatial thinking from the perspective of individual differences as well as employing more commonly used experimental methods. In her work on individual differences, she studies large-scale spatial abilities involved in navigation and learning the layout of environments, as well as smaller-scale spatial abilities involved in mental rotation and perspective taking. Her current research projects include understanding the roles of internal and external visualizations in reasoning about diverse topics such as mechanical systems, weather patterns and molecular structure and the use of visualization versus analytic problem solving strategies in scientific problem solving.