Jeffrey Heer
Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer at University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJeffrey Heer is a data visualization and HCI leader with 15+ years of experience spanning academia and startups, currently co-founding Ridge AI while serving as a Professor at the University of Washington directing the Interactive Data Lab. He co-founded Trifacta and led UX and product work that scaled to enterprise acquisition, bringing rare founder-level product instincts to research-driven engineering. His technical contributions power widely used open-source visualization grammars and libraries—most notably D3, Vega, and Vega-Lite—where he’s implemented core algorithms, performance improvements, and dataset infrastructure. Heer blends full-stack engineering (from data pipelines and parser work to front-end interaction design) with rigorous HCI research, making tools that reach millions of viewers and thousands of analysts. Unusually, he balances deep compiler- and AST-level contributions (Idyll) with practical dataset engineering and curriculum development for visualization education. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and is active in both academic publishing and high-impact open-source projects.
15 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (38)
data-visualizations10
algorithms10
javascript10
visualization10
vega10
abstract-syntax-tree10
data-engineering10
charts10
data-visualisation10
data-structure10
datasets10
declarative-programming10
compiler-design10
computer-engineering10
performance-optimization10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
vega/vega
Feb 2013 - Mar 2022
A visualization grammar.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:127 releases, 11 reviews, 3972 commits in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Jeffrey contributed to the Vega project by implementing scene graph and dataflow features, and improving the performance of data processing pipelines. Their work included exporting internal group items, updating type inference, and removing expression functions. They also worked on axis and legend settings, incorporating modular random numbers, and introducing improvements to the encode and dataflow systems.
svgcanvasgrammarvegavisualization-grammar
vega/datalib
Apr 2015 - Apr 2021
JavaScript data utility library.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:384 commits, 64 PRs, 264 pushes in 6 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Jeffrey primarily contributed to the `datalib` JavaScript data utility library. Their contributions involved adding and improving test cases for the utility methods. Key tasks included refactoring existing methods like 'uniq' to 'distinct' and implementing new methods for calculating statistics, specifically related to data aggregation and analysis. Additionally, they updated the library's build and test configurations.
javascripttypescriptutility-libraryutility-data
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