About

Foundation president, Harvey Fineberg, and chairman emeritus and co-founder, Gordon Moore, discuss the Statement of Founders’ Intent with staff.

Matthew Turk, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Information Sciences and Astronomy

Dr. Turk runs the Data Exploration Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which seeks to develop and utilize innovative, interdisciplinary tools for data analysis and visualization.

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Research Description

Matthew Turk runs the Data Exploration Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They seek to develop and utilize innovative, interdisciplinary tools for data analysis and visualization, to support the scholarly pursuits of themselves and others and to build a strong community engaged in participatory inquiry. Their research seeks to answer questions how scientists engage with data, how semantic representations can facilitate inquiry, and how to build effective interdisciplinary collaborations. Tools such as yt (yt-project.org) serve as platforms for both inquiry and development, and researchers are currently engaged in inquiry in fields such as astrophysics, seismology, and nuclear engineering.

At present, the ways that researchers interact with data are frequently impeded by representations of data on disk, with the meaning of that data obscured by any number of technical factors. By enabling meaningful approaches to data and fostering direct technology transfer between domains of study, we will engage develop lasting collaborations that share both technology and social infrastructure. Tools built in this lab can even be used for developing public engagement through visualization and virtual reality techniques.

Matthew Turk earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Physics in 2009, and spent time as a postdoc at the University of California at San Diego and as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University in the CyberInfrastructure for Transformative Computational Science program. He is Principal Investigator on an NSF SI2-SSE award for reusable components of simulation and analysis, as well as Co-PI on an NSF CC*DIBBS award for unifying cyberinfrastructure pathways for data access and analysis. He's been involved in sustainable scientific software working groups (such as WSSSPE), the scientific python community, and serves as a board member for NumFOCUS.

More information:

Lab Website

Additional Lab Information

Lab Group on GitHub

Lab Group on Bitbucket

ORCID: 0000-0002-5294-0198