Hi, I’m Frank Elavsky
I research, design, engineer, contribute to standards, and talk about things at the intersection of data work and accessibility. I consider myself a maker and a builder before anything else, but I like to think I also do this work critically.
I’m a PhD student and researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, some mix of contractor/intern doing data interaction research at Apple , and senior research scientist at Fizz Studio.
At CMU, I am advised by Dominik Moritz and Patrick Carrington and a member of the Data Interaction Group and AXLE Lab. I am also a W3C invited expert in data visualization in the ARIA Working Group and volunteer my time with other efforts.
- fje@cmu.edu
- Pittsburgh, PA
My background
Before embarking on a PhD I was a staff design systems engineer at Visa on their Data Experience team and lead contributor to the accessibility efforts of their first open source library, Visa Chart Components. We were able to do some pretty extraordinary things together and I am fortunate to have worked alongside such world-class folks.
Prior to Visa I had a high-octane 2 years at Northwestern University working for Research Computing Services providing data visualization support to over two dozen research projects across a wide range of disciplines. Several of my projects won awards and have been featured in over 60 research publications (including the privilege of being uncredited in the 2017 Nobel Lecture on Physics), 100+ web articles, 4 PhD theses, 4 graduate courses, and 9 textbooks.
In my early career (before Northwestern), I worked in federal policy analyzing large, complex medicare/medicaid datasets and building visualization tools for lawyers and policymakers.
Featured Projects
Chartability
Chartability is a set of principles and heuristics for evaluating the accessibility of data experiences.
Visa Chart Components
Visa Chart Components is an accessibility focused, framework agnostic set of data experience design systems components for the web.
Modeling Career Hot Streaks
Our interactive Hot Streaks model promoted Liu et al’s research, visualizing over 1m data points on the web using SVG.
Featured Publications
Latest News
- I passed my quals! (Research communication requirement)
- We released the Chartability Workbook, v2.
- I started working at Apple.
- I became a W3C Invited Expert as a member of the ARIA Working Group.
- I started my PhD at Carnegie Mellon University.
- We moved to Pittsburgh!
- We released Chartability.
- I partnered with Fizz Studio to offer industry consulting in visualization and accessibility.
- We open sourced Visa Chart Components.
- I organized and co-founded the DataViz Accessibility Advocacy and Advisory Group (DataVizA11y).
Latest Visits
| Jan 26, '23 | Guest Lecture, Northwestern University |
| Jan 9–13, '23 | Course Taught, Northwestern University |
| Jan 5, '23 | Invited Talk, Observable HQ |
| Nov 15, '22 | Guest Lecture, University of Washington |
| Sep 1, '22 | Invited Talk, UC, Cincinnati, OH |
| Jun 13–17, '22 | Presenting Work, EuroVis, Rome, Italy |
| May 20, '22 | Guest Lecture, University of Washington |
| May 11, '22 | Invited Talk, Linkedin Learning |
| Apr 14, '22 | Invited Talk, Columbia University, Barnard College |
| Jan 15, '22 | Invited Talk, Jupyter Project |