Cecilia Aragon is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, where she is director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab.

Previously, she was a computer scientist in the Computational Research Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2005, 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 research focuses on human-centered data science, an emerging field at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and the statistical and computational techniques of data science. She and her students develop collaborative visual analytics tools to facilitate data science, and study current scientific practice around large and complex data sets. She has authored or co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and over 100 other publications in the areas of HCI, CSCW, data science, visual analytics, machine learning, and astrophysics.

In 2008, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the US government on outstanding scientists in the early stages of their careers, for her work in collaborative data-intensive science.

Aragon is also active supporting diversity in computing. She is a founding member of Latinas in Computing, a board member of the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), and a founding member of Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Diversity Working Group and Women in Science Council.