Coming Home to a Special Place

The University of Illinois Chicago has appointed me the fifth Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). I’ve found myself thinking less about the title than about the place, so the place is what I want to write about.

For anyone who hasn’t crossed paths with it, EVL is a hard place to summarize. It was founded in 1973 by computer scientist Tom DeFanti and artist-physicist Dan Sandin as a joint program of the College of Engineering and the School of Art and Design. That pairing was unusual then and, frankly, it’s still unusual now. Most labs pick a side. EVL never did. It has spent more than fifty years sitting squarely in the space where computing, visualization, and the arts overlap, which makes it one of the longest-running interdisciplinary research labs anywhere. EVL is probably best known for conceiving and building the CAVE virtual reality theater in 1991, a room you could walk into and be surrounded by a simulation, years before “immersive” became a marketing word.

I mention the CAVE for a reason that isn’t about institutional history. I worked on it (or maybe I should say in it) as a graduate student. That project, in that lab, is where my career actually began.

I came to EVL young and unformed, and the lab handed me something I didn’t know I needed: a workbench shared with people who thought nothing like me. Artists who cared about how a thing felt and looked. Engineers who cared about whether the thing would hold up under load. Scientists who just wanted to see their data. The thought-provoking conversations and the collaboration across that mix of people taught me more than any single course ever did. I went on to earn a master’s degree from UIC in 1994, and I joined UIC’s computer science faculty in 2022. But the through-line of all of it traces back to a graduate student standing inside a glowing cube, trying to make a picture move correctly.

EVL is also, quietly, the reason I have spent 30-plus years at Argonne National Laboratory. A national lab is an interdisciplinary instrument by design. It only works when physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers can sit at the same table and actually hear one another. I walked into Argonne already fluent in that, because EVL had taught me the language of collaboration and being part of a team. I didn’t have to learn how to collaborate across a divide; I had simply never worked any other way. That fluency turned out to be the single most useful thing I brought with me, and EVL is where it came from.

So a few words on how I think about leading, because stepping into a director’s role forces you to put it into sentences.

I don’t believe the best ideas come from the front of the room. They come from the room. My job, as I understand it, is not to be the smartest voice but to keep the right people in conversation long enough for something unexpected to happen, and then to get out of the way of it. Interdisciplinary work is slow and occasionally maddening, because two specialists often can’t even agree on what the problem is before they can solve it. A leader’s real task is to protect that messy middle stretch, to make it safe to be confused out loud, and to resist the urge to flatten everything into a single discipline’s language just because that would be tidier. EVL has done this for half a century. My role isn’t to fix it or to steer it. It’s to make sure the environment stays in place, so the people here have the room to do their work.

The original EVL vision, that computing and the arts and the sciences belong together, feels less like a historical curiosity and more like an urgent idea. As our tools get more powerful, the hard questions are increasingly about meaning, perception, and human judgment, and those are exactly the questions you can’t answer from inside one field. Interdisciplinary research is more important now than it has ever been.

I owe this place a great deal. It shaped my career, led me to Argonne, and taught me how to work with people who don’t share my training. The best thing I can do now is help keep it the kind of place that does the same for the next person who walks in.