The VIS 2026 capstone talk will be given by Nils Gehlenborg.
Nils Gehlenborg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. His research aims to improve human health by developing visual interfaces and computational techniques that let scientists and clinicians work efficiently with biomedical data. His approach tightly integrates algorithmic methods from biomedical informatics with advanced data visualization, in close collaboration with clinicians and experimentalists. He is currently developing tools to visualize 3D genome conformation data and heterogeneous data from large-scale cancer genomics studies, aiming to support both sense-making in biology and reproducible, collaborative research. He is also a Co-Investigator for the 4D Nucleome Network Data Coordination and Integration Center at Harvard Medical School.
Gehlenborg co-founded BioVis, the Symposium on Biological Data Visualization, and VIZBI, the annual workshop on Visualizing Biological Data; he previously served as BioVis general chair and now chairs its steering committee. He co-chairs the Policy Working Group for the 4D Nucleome Network, an NIH Common Fund project, has served on program committees for multiple bioinformatics and data visualization conferences, and holds editorial roles including associate editor of BMC Bioinformatics. He has also contributed to Nature Methods’ “Points of View” data visualization column.