Dr. Plaisant works at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. She earned a Doctorat d'Ingenieur degree in France in 1982 (similar to a Industrial Engineering PhD) and has written over 110 refereed technical publications. She co-authored with Ben Shneiderman the 4th and 5th Editions of Designing the User Interface , one of the major books on the topic of Human-Computer Interaction. She enjoys working with multidisciplinary teams on designing and evaluating new interface technologies that are useable and useful. Research contributions include innovative visualizations (such as LifeLines for summaries of medical records, or SpaceTree for hierarchical data exploration) to search interfaces, technology for families, or evaluation methodologies. Those interaction techniques have been carefully validated with user studies and are finding applications in industry, government information systems and digital libraries.