Mahima Pushkarna

CAMD’s Department of Art and Design welcomes Mahima Pushkarna to its MFA in Information Design and Visualization program.

Mahima, who graduated with an MFA in Information Design and Visualization in 2016, returns to campus to teach Information Design and Visual Analytics (PPUA 6302) this spring. She is excited to join the faculty for several reasons, but especially the opportunity to give back to the information design community at Northeastern University.

“Northeastern has a dynamic, diverse and expanding information design community and I’m excited to be a part of it even after graduating,” explained Mahima.

As a faculty member, Mahima will have plenty of real-world experience to bring to the classroom. She was recently hired to join Google’s Big Picture Visualization group as a visual designer. There, she will be working as an information designer in the domain of machine learning and neural networks on a talented team led by Fernanda Veigas and Martin Wattenberg. She will have the opportunity to contribute to several exciting projects, centered around human-computer interaction and visualizations, machine intelligence and education innovation.

“The field is exploding in many ways in the industry; the demand for thoughtful information design and visualization is increasing,” explained Mahima. “It is important to maintain a strong, bi-directional flow of knowledge and redirect insights from the industry into academia (and vice-versa) to prepare students to take on the many challenges that are there to explore and solve.”

The format of the course Mahima is teaching at Northeastern is an exciting aspect of it. She is mixing up seminar- and studio-style teaching to deliver a combination of some of the best classes she attended at Northeastern as a graduate student.

“Through this hybrid teaching approach, I am hoping to expose students to multiple ways of thinking about information design in a dynamic landscape, ideally by simultaneously encouraging them to investigate visual ways of telling data stories,” Mahima said.