Leilani Battle

Leilani Battle is an African-American computer scientist currently serving as the Robert E. Dinning Endowed Associate Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington. She is also the Co-Director of the Interactive Data Lab at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on developing data-intensive interactive systems to aid analysts in conducting complex data exploration and analysis. Her work brings together technologies from databases, human-computer interaction, and visualization, achieving significant breakthroughs in large-scale data processing and interactive interface integration. Battle has received numerous prestigious awards, including the 2022 TCDE Rising Star Award and the 2023 IEEE VGTC Significant New Researcher Award, and was recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of the Innovators Under 35 in 2020. Her research has been funded by organizations such as Adobe, VMWare, Google, and the National Science Foundation.

• 2021–Present·University of Washington·Associate Professor
  • Researching the integration of databases and human-computer interaction, developing interactive data-intensive systems.
• 2018–2021·University of Maryland·Assistant Professor
  • Led the Battle Data Lab, focusing on intuitive interactive tools for big data science.
• 2017·Interactive Data Lab, University of Washington·Postdoctoral Researcher
  • Specialized in behavior-driven optimization techniques for large-scale data exploration.

• 2011–2017·Massachusetts Institute of Technology·PhD (Computer Science)
  • Doctoral dissertation titled "Behavior-Driven Optimization Techniques for Scalable Data Exploration," advised by Michael Stonebraker.
• 2009–2013·Massachusetts Institute of Technology·Master's (Computer Science)
  • Research areas included databases and visualization.
• 2007–2011·University of Washington·Bachelor's (Computer Engineering)
  • Shifted interests from video games to scientific research during undergraduate studies.