Susan VanderPlas, associate professor of statistics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s most prestigious honor for early-career faculty. The five-year grant will fund her project, Advancing Experimental Frameworks and Empirically-based Guidelines for Designing and Assessing Statistical Data Graphics.
The award recognizes VanderPlas’ research on how people interpret statistical graphics — charts and graphs, for example — that help communicate data. While many past studies focused on if viewers could read exact values from charts — VanderPlas asked broader questions: Do charts help audiences understand the “big picture”? How do design choices shape the story people take away?
“It’s very validating that NSF recognizes how important it is to study how people communicate with charts and graphs, how best to measure that, and how important data visualization literacy is to teach in statistics,” VanderPlas said.
Her path to this research blends psychology, statistics and personal experience. As an undergraduate, she studied applied mathematics and psychology to better understand how people think. She is also colorblind, an experience that highlighted for her how easily certain chart designs can confuse or exclude readers.
“From a personal perspective, I knew all too well that some design decisions make charts ineffective,” she said.
By building frameworks to evaluate when charts succeed or fail, VanderPlas hopes to provide clearer guidelines for scientists, educators and communicators. She also plans to involve students, who will participate in classroom experiments that generate research data and build capacity to critically assess graphics.
“The goal is to help people create graphs that enable better data-driven decision making — whether in science or everyday life,” she said.
