Rate My Professor Helen Purchase

Professor Helen Purchase is Professor in the Department of Human Centred Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, a position she assumed in August 2022. She serves as Head of Department, Director of the Data Visualisation and Immersive Analytics lab, and Director of Education for the HCC Department. Previously, from 2001 to 2022, she worked at the University of Glasgow, including as Director of the MSc in Information Technology, where she introduced multiple MSc programs that quadrupled student numbers. From 1992 to 2001, following her PhD, she advanced from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science (now School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering) at the University of Queensland. Purchase received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in October 1992 for research on schematic network-based representations in an intelligent tutoring system for teaching ontological concepts to primary school children. She also earned an MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing from Cambridge University and completed undergraduate studies at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Purchase's research focuses on human understanding of visual stimuli. She pioneered human experiments to identify effective graph and network drawing methods from 1995, applying empirical approaches to visual stimuli design and comprehension, including photographs, biological and social networks, web pages, mobile phone icons, and sets. Her interests encompass network drawings (static, dynamic, applied; user-centred relational data depiction), infographics and graphic design for public communication especially public health, cognitive and perceptual visual communication, and educational technology, aligning with UN SDGs 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 4 (Quality Education). Notable works include her single-authored book Experimental Human-Computer Interaction (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and recent publications such as 'The Multi-Dimensional Landscape of Graph Drawing Metrics' (Mooney, Purchase et al., PacificVis 2024), 'The Perception of Stress in Graph Drawings' (Mooney, Purchase et al., GD 2024), 'Extending Adjacency Matrices to 3D with Triangles' (Pan, Purchase et al., PacificVis 2024), 'Impact of interaction technique in interactive data visualisations' (van Berkel, Purchase et al., International Journal of Human Computer Studies 2024), and '3D Remote Monitoring and Diagnosis during a Pandemic' (Rufai, Purchase et al., PACMHCI 2024). With 107 research outputs comprising 63 conference papers and 34 journal articles, she earned the UQ Teaching Excellence Award (1999), University of Glasgow Teaching Excellence Award (2011), and Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (2015). She delivered keynotes at EGC 2012 (Bordeaux), VINCI 2014 (Sydney), VISSOFT 2018 (Madrid), IVAPP 2020 (Valletta), SACLA 2020, and OxWoCS 2020.