Katy Börner - Networks, noticing what we don't expect, and an atlas for navigating our world

Katy Börner is one of the great mappers of our age. Her maps tell the history of science, trace how communication has evolved from the stone age to modern day, and reveal the connections across our society. In her work, all of these things become visual and interactive. That is to say she is the perfect person to talk to in this age when complexity lurks behind the most intractable issues facing our society and demands new ways of witnessing them.

But Katy does something more than map. She understands the interconnections in those maps and has used those connections to publish cutting-edge scientific research, write books that jump out ahead of their time, and curate awe-inspiring exhibits.

She has an uncommon ability to give different ways of knowing a meeting place and a language to communicate. In her work, we can all learn the art of connection, collaboration, and consilience.

Katy Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Information Science in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, the university's highest academic rank.

She is the Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), The Netherlands.

Katy is the author of the three-part Atlas series of books. The first, Atlas of Science: Visualizing what we know, revealed the power of maps in science. The second, Atlas of Knowledge: Anyone can map, foregrounded the visualization component. The series was completed this year with the publication of Atlas of Forecasts: Modeling and Mapping Desirable Futures in which Börner shows how models, maps and forecasts inform decision-making in education, science, technology and policy-making.

The entire series builds, in part, on the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit, a nearly 20-year ongoing internationally recognized science exhibition that demonstrates the power of maps to analyze, organize, and visualize abstract intellectual spaces.

Katy is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery, and she was honored with the inaugural Ada Lovelace Award by the city of Bloomington, Indiana, in recognition of her contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

She holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997.