Zening Qu - Graduate Research Assistant

Zening Qu

Graduate Research Assistant

Seattle, Washington, United States

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Zening Qu is a visualization and HCI-focused software engineer and PhD candidate with 14 years of experience building interactive tools and visual analytics systems. At the University of Washington Interactive Data Lab, Zening led projects like Libra and co-developed Voyager2 and Vega-Tooltip, translating research ideas into widely useful web tools and libraries used by the visualization community. Their work spans front-end and full-stack development—evident from notable contributions to flagship open-source projects such as Vega-Lite and Voyager where they improved gallery UX, layouts, and post-render actions. Equally comfortable in academic and industry settings, Zening has applied visualization to domains from nonprofit eligibility systems at Microsoft to public-facing installations and networked games, showing a knack for turning complex data and systems into approachable, interactive experiences. Based in Seattle, they combine rigorous HCI training with practical engineering to accelerate exploratory analysis and user-centered visualization.

14 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Information Visualization, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Information Visualization at University of Washington

High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Jinhua No.1 High School

Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Zhejiang University

Chinese, English, Japanese

Github Skills (18)

javascript10

visualization10

css10

typescript10

front-end-development10

typescript-types10

typescripts10

visualizations10

vega-lite10

react10

redux9

configuration-management9

d3js9

html9

scs8

Programming languages (6)

TypeScriptC++CSSJavaScriptHTMLPython

Github contributions (5)

vega/voyager

Jul 2016 - Jun 2019

Visualization Tool for Data Exploration

Role in this project:

Full-stack Developer

Contributions:13 commits, 14 PRs, 69 pushes in 2 years 11 months

Contributions summary:Zening contributed significantly to the `vega/voyager` repository, a visualization tool. They implemented UI enhancements such as adding a manual specification flag to the config and supporting multiple tabs. Further, they updated existing components like VegaLite to include a `viewRunAfter` function for post-render actions, while also exporting necessary modules, specifically ACTION_TYPE_INDEX and `isVoyagerAction`, for use in external applications. They modified different files, showing work in front-end and related configurations.

data-analysisdata-explorationdata-sciencedata-visualizationvisualization

vega/vega-lite

Feb 2016 - Aug 2017

A concise grammar of interactive graphics, built on Vega.

Role in this project:

Front-end Developer

Contributions:37 commits, 20 PRs, 24 pushes in 1 year 6 months

Contributions summary:Zening primarily contributed to the front-end development of a gallery showcasing Vega-Lite visualizations. Their work included adding and modifying gallery layouts, incorporating image previews, and enhancing user interaction through improved hover effects. The user also worked on the gallery's JavaScript and CSS, refining its visual presentation and incorporating changes to the underlying data structure to support the gallery functionality. Additionally, the user addressed issues by merging master branch changes and updating the site's CSS and HTML structure.

chartsinteractive-graphicsvisual-analysisplotgrammar

Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.

Request Free Trial