bio

Dr. Amy Rae Fox is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, whose research centers on the role of cognition in information visualization and diagrammatic reasoning.

Prior to joining the faculty at UCSD, she worked as a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT with the Visualization Group, where she lead projects exploring the influence of sociocultural phenomena on data visualization, and the role of interactive visualizations in exploratory data analysis. She completed her doctoral research at UC San Diego, examining the integration of perceptual and knowledge-driven processing in graphical discovery—an often-neglected stage of graph comprehension that characterizes how humans construct meaning for unfamiliar graphs. Dr. Fox holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego, an MSEd in Instructional Design from Universite Grenoble, an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (Cognitive Visualization) from California State Chico, and BSc in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead Scholar. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a management and technology consultant for nearly a decade, honing her skills in project management, information architecture and design.

Dr. Fox is a leader in the burgeoning interdisciplinary research community of Visualization Psychology, contributing to the IEEE VIS, Cognitive Science, Psychonomics, GRC VSE and Diagrams research communitites. She is a proud first generation college student, and enthusiastic mentor of students taking non-traditional paths through industry and academia.