Andrew McNutt earned a doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Chicago in 2023 for his thesis on “Understanding and Enhancing JSON-based DSL Interfaces for Visualization”. He received a BS in Physics from Reed College in 2014 and MS in computer science from the University of Chicago in 2019. After this, he spent a year as postdoc at the University of Washington.
From 2024, he is an assistant professor at the University of Utah. Andrew’s research focuses on topics related to critical visualization, programming interfaces, and domain-specific languages for and around visualization. He seeks to empower end-users to conduct data-rich tasks (such as visual analytics) in a way that facilitates and encourages best practices while accommodating variance in skill, attention, and domain by designing interfaces (ranging from languages to GUIs) that improve how they use, manipulate, and present data.
Andrew McNutt’s work significantly raised the level of rigor with which the visualization community approaches design-specific languages both as tool and object of study. Andrew also builds theories and mechanisms to help guide the design of data visualizations. It is one thing to know a guideline, but it is another to put it into practice or remember to use it. He is currently co-supervising 3 PhD students.
He has an excellent publication record with around 40 articles, many of them in top journals and conferences, and holds one patent. He has organized a number of IEEE VIS workshops including the boundary pushing alt.vis and the sustainability focused VISions of the Future. He has received 9 recognitions for outstanding reviews. His role in the European research community is underlined by several publications in the Computer Graphics Forum, including a single-authored full paper that got a Best Paper Honorable Mention. From 2025, he serves as a member of the EuroVis full paper and short paper program committees.
Through his outstanding research and leadership Andrew McNutt serves as a role model for early career researchers and EuroVis is very pleased to announce him as the winner of the Johanna Beyer EuroVis Early Career Researcher Award 2026, in recognition of his outstanding contributions in critical visualization, programming interfaces, and for graphically augmenting domain-specific languages.