Dr. Cecilia Aragon is an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering and the eScience Institute at the University of Washington, where she directs the Scientific Collaboration and Creativity Lab. Previously, she was a computer scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for six years, after earning her Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004. She earned her B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. Her current research focuses on human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) in scientific collaborations, distributed creativity, information visualization, collaborative games, the visual understanding of very large data sets, and how social media and new methods of computer-mediated communication are changing scientific practice. She has developed novel visual interfaces for collaborative exploration of very large scientific data sets, and has authored or co-authored over 45 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in the areas of computer-supported cooperative work, human-computer interaction, visualization, visual analytics, image processing, machine learning, cyberinfrastructure, and astrophysics. In 2008, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her work in collaborative data-intensive science.

Her research has been recognized with four Best Paper awards since 2004, and she was recently named one of the Top 25 Women of 2009 by Hispanic Business Magazine. Her work on the Sunfall data visualization and workflow management system for the Nearby Supernova Factory helped advance the study of supernovae in order to reduce the statistical uncertainties on key cosmological parameters that categorize dark energy, one of the grand challenges in physics today.

Aragon has an interdisciplinary background, including over 15 years of software development experience in industry and NASA, and a three-year stint as the founder and CEO of a small company. Her early research was in theoretical computer science and analysis of algorithms. She is the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of a data structure, the treap, which has been commended for its elegance and efficiency, and is now widely used in production applications ranging from wireless networking to memory allocation to fast parallel aggregate set operations.

Aragon is also active in program service and supporting diversity in computing. She is a founding member of Latinas in Computing, was a board member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), a founding member of Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council, chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Entrepreneur and Pioneer Awards committee, and has served as a reviewer and program committee member for numerous computer science conferences.