Elsie Lee-Robbins' professional headshot

Elsie Lee-Robbins

Howdy! I'm a data visualization designer with a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. I craft data-driven stories to communicate the urgency and solutions around climate change and social justice issues. My work spans digital and novel physical mediums - such as LEGOs, oil paints, bullet journals, and more. Most recently, I won a Big Ten data visualization championship for my data visualization made out of LEGOs!

Please reach out if you're interested in learning more about my work: elsielee@umich.edu.

Experience


Datavis Specialist

Postal Regulatory Commission

2024 - current

Data visualization specialist at the Postal Regulatory Commission. Visualizing data on service performance and finances of the postal service.

PhD student

University of Michigan

2019 - 2024

PhD student in the School of Information at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Advised by the wonderful Eytan Adar.

Communications Fellow

Ecology Center

2023

Data visualization designer at the Ecology Center, a local Ann Arbor nonprofit for environmental health and climate justice.

Research Intern

Microsoft Research

2022

Summer intern at Microsoft Research, researching narration in data storytelling videos with John Thompson, Bongshin Lee, and Steven Drucker.

Summer PhD Intern

American Institutes for Research

2021

Data visualization intern at the American Institutes for Research, visualizing the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data with Cadelle Hemphill, Tiago Caliço, and Juanita Hicks.

Lab Manager

Northwestern University

2017 - 2019

Lab manager at the Visual Thinking Lab with Steve Franconeri at Northwestern University.

BA, Information Technology

& Psychology

Rutgers University

2017

Research assistant at Rutgers University with Eileen Kowler and Jason Rubenstein, using eye-tracking techniques to study visual perception of data visualizations.

Featured Projects

Data illustration of 5 receipts, 4 of which are orange, which shows that Toxic BPS was detected on 4 out of 5 receipts tested

Ecology Center

Bar chart of electric utility reliability data showing that DTE is the slowest utility at returning power to customers after an outage

Ann Arbor for Public Power

A 3D bar chart made out of LEGOs

LEGO Themes: From Generic to Franchise

A scatterplot made out of LEGOs

Participatory LEGO Data Visualizations

A visual representation of the learning objectives taxonomy with rows as verbs and columns as nouns, indicating all the potential combinations

Learning Objectives for Data Visualization

A racing internet cable chart showing each US state's connectivity to the internet

American Institutes for Research - Student Access to Internet

Featured Publications

A visual representation of a taxonomy for affective objectives as a grid with verbs as rows and nouns as columns

🏆 Elsie Lee-Robbins & Eytan Adar (2022). Affective Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualizations. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. [pdf] 🏆 Best Paper Award!

Three examples of visualization goals with four visualization designs

Elsie Lee-Robbins, Shiqing (Licia) He, & Eytan Adar (2021). Learning objectives, insights, and assessments: How specification formats impact design. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. [pdf]

A visual representation of a taxonomy for cognitive objectives as a grid with verbs as rows and nouns as columns

Eytan Adar & Elsie Lee (2020). Communicative visualizations as a learning problem. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. [pdf]

Contact

Interested in learning more?

Send me an email! elsielee [at] umich [dot] edu

Or follow me on social media @elsieleerobbins




© 2024 Elsie LR