Astronomy research has not only redefined our understanding of where and how stars form in our Galaxy, but it has also acquired phenomenal amounts of data that scientists can draw from. However, much of the abundant data produced by current research is still being hoarded on the hard drives of an individual research team, slowing progress. Often, answers could be at the fingertips of researchers facing a prevailing problem, and data must be aggregated and shared to quicken the discovery process. Dr. Alyssa Goodman, Robert Wheeler Willson Professor of Applied Astronomy at Harvard University, provides a number of platforms to “accelerate the pace of science” for scientists across multiple disciplines, and her team. Motivated to make an impactful difference, Dr. Goodman expands her influence beyond astronomy and brings people together to encourage collaboration, creating data visualization, and online systems for research and education.

Named the 2015 Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation Dr. Goodman leads the “Seamless Astronomy” collaboration at Harvard and is the Founding Director of the Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) at Harvard. From 2005-2008, she led the IIC, teaming computer scientists up with disciplinary scientists to give each the opportunity to make the world's most important scientific challenges more tractable. Her expertise in utilizing resources and conducting swift computational analyses has more broadly allowed for improved and longer-lasting reuse of data, which is increasingly the most efficient path to new discoveries in science. To emphasize the importance of computer simulation in our everyday lives, she is also working with her Harvard colleagues to create a new set of online learning materials, called PredictionX to help educate the public. Breakthroughs in the software she is developing have life-saving applications in medical imaging and genomic analysis, and her work in science education, particularly in using new technologies in teaching, is improving and accelerating what people -- scientists and the public alike -- can learn about the world, and the Universe, around them.

Dr. Goodman’s current areas of impact include:

• Astronomy Research: Dr. Goodman studies how stars form in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. At present, her group has many projects ongoing, ranging in scale from studying the earliest known tiny cluster of proto-stars to studying the full distribution of star-forming gas in the Milky Way. One of their most exciting projects has to do with their discovery of a new class of gas clouds they have named the "Bones of the Milky Way," that can be used to map out the Galaxy's spiral structure with much higher resolution than has ever been achievable before. The team is also creating a new catalog that describes where “all” of the dense gas in the Milky Way lies, using a technique that relies on the same kind of "tree" diagrams that Charles Darwin used. That catalog will be used to compare our Milky Way to the billions of other galaxies we see in our Universe, providing more insight into the structure of the Universe.
• Data Visualization: The "Seamless Astronomy" collaboration Dr. Goodman leads at Harvard develops and improves a variety of software packages used in the display and analysis of high-dimensional data. Most notable amongst her software efforts are:
  • Glue, a package for "linked view" visualization that is being developed in part for visualizing the data to come from NASA's successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, called "James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)," and which has tremendous potential in medical imaging. Traditionally, researchers spend too much time on data wrangling, or getting the data into a format useful for asking the questions that they want to ask. Glue, on the other hand, lets users open many datasets at once and interconnect certain attributes of the data, in order to create and then dynamically-link different kinds of visualizations, including maps, charts, three-dimensional cubes, etc. Working with an interdisciplinary team of researchers across multiple domains, Dr. Goodman focuses on addressing the unsolved problems in computer graphics regarding three-dimensional selection. The digital ability to define a 3D shape of data-driven object will not only facilitate astronomical research but radically improve medical image analysis and change millions of lives. Dr. Goodman envisions the Glue software, motivated in astronomy, helping surgeons combine and analyze various modes of 3D medical imaging with other diagnostic data, dramatically advancing “astronomical medicine,” a field in which she is considered a pioneer. 
  • The ADS All Sky Survey, which includes heat maps of the Sky showing which parts of the Sky have been studied most, and for what reason, at what times, as well as links to the underlying articles in the distribution. 
  • Authorea, an online system for collaborative work on scientific articles, based on GitHub. Authorea is now a startup, with $600K in venture funding, and Dr. Goodman is its Senior Scientific Advisor. One Authorea document authored by Dr. Goodman offers a demonstration “Paper of the Future,” and showcases technology that Dr. Goodman thinks is important to embed in scholarly documents in the future. An online platform for writing and managing scientific documents for not only astronomical researchers but for researchers across all fields, Authorea allows data sharing, interactive graphics, and smart permanent links to data sources. Authorea’s creators hope to facilitate better, more shareable and reproducible, research, while saving people time.  
  • Evangelizing: In order to inspire more researchers to use (better) data visualization in their work, Dr. Goodman teaches an undergraduate course at Harvard called "The Art of Numbers," and she speaks to a diverse array of groups beyond Harvard. Most recently, she was one of the four speakers at the "See, Think, Design, Produce" advanced course on data visualization hosted by Edward Tufte in February 2015 in San Francisco. 
• Education Research, and Technology in Education: The WorldWide Telescope (worldwidetelescope.org) is an incredible “Universe Information System” developed by Dr. Goodman’s colleagues at Microsoft Research, on which Dr. Goodman is the principal astronomer-consultant. In 2008, Dr. Goodman founded the Worldwide Telescope Ambassadors (WWTA) Program (wwtambassadors.org), which uses WWT  to engage learners all over the world in STEM. See wwtstories.org for ways that WWT is currently being used to reach a variety of audiences. WWTA has both formal (in-classroom) and informal (online, science fairs, etc) activities, and the education research she has done to measure and optimize the efficacy of WWT in teaching shows that students are both more engaged and more educated when interactive, beautiful, and data-rich environments like WWT are integrated into curricula.