Lynn Cherny (born 1967) is a Boston-based data analysis consultant specialized in data mining and analysis, customer research, and interface design. She is currently a faculty member at
EMLYON Business School. She has worked as a consultant for companies including
TiVo
TiVo ( ) is a digital video recorder (DVR) developed and marketed by Xperi (previously by TiVo Corporation and TiVo Inc.) and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose fea ...
,
Adobe
Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for mudbrick. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is use ...
,
AT&T Labs
AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown Township, New J ...
,
Autodesk
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software corporation that provides software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. Autodesk is headquarte ...
, and Internet startups, doing work such as statistical programming in
R and
Python, text clustering, data analysis on survey data and software usage logs, design for bioinformatics tools, dashboard mockups, and soup-to-nuts interaction design.
Education
Cherny received a Ph.D. from
Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
in
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
; an M.Phil. from
Cambridge University
The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...
in Computer Speech and Language Processing; and a B.A. from
University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...
in
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
.
Career
Cherny showcased her interest in data analysis and design while she was a Ph.D. student at Stanford. Her career began in research in an HCI group at
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
(later AT&T Labs), but she left research to work in industry as a UI designer. She also serves as a self-employed consultant for
data analysis
Data analysis is the process of inspecting, Data cleansing, cleansing, Data transformation, transforming, and Data modeling, modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Da ...
and
data visualization
Data and information visualization (data viz/vis or info viz/vis) is the practice of designing and creating Graphics, graphic or visual Representation (arts), representations of a large amount of complex quantitative and qualitative data and i ...
at
Ghostweather Research & Design, LLC. In recent years, she received an academic fellowship teaching Interactive Data Visualization from
University of Miami
The University of Miami (UM, UMiami, Miami, U of M, and The U) is a private university, private research university in Coral Gables, Florida, United States. , the university enrolled 19,852 students in two colleges and ten schools across over ...
, and currently serves as associate professor in
Emlyon Business School at
Lyon, France. She is also the author of two books "Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace,"
and "Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World."
Data-driven design
Cherny spent 20 years in various
UX,
UI, and usability roles in
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
,
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
,
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Washington and in the Pacific Northwest region of North America. With a population of 780,995 in 2024, it is the 18th-most populous city in the United States. The city is the cou ...
, and
Boston
Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...
. Starting from 1998, she served as one of the first UI designer at
Excite, Inc in 2000, she was hired as a Senior UI Designer and became manager of the UI and Usability group at
TiVo, Inc. Leaving for a job opportunity offered by
Axance, a web usability consulting company in
Paris, France
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...
in 2001,
Cherny was responsible for international projects and project oversight, as well as extending business into design consulting. From 2002 to 2004, she served as senior Interaction Designer for
Adobe Systems, Inc,
where she designed for interoperability and UI consistency in the Creative Suite 2 bundle, which consisted of
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe for Windows and macOS. It was created in 1987 by Thomas and John Knoll. It is the most used tool for professional digital art, especially in raster graphics editin ...
,
Illustrator
An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicate ...
,
InDesign,
Acrobat
Acrobatics () is the performance of human feats of balance, agility, and motor coordination. Acrobatic skills are used in performing arts, sporting events, and martial arts. Extensive use of acrobatic skills are most often performed in acro d ...
. She shared a patent for some of her work on color management synchronization, settings and PDF export. Cherny worked for the
MathWorks
The MathWorks, Inc. is an American privately held corporation that specializes in mathematical computing software. Its major products include MATLAB and Simulink, which support data analysis and simulation.
History
MATLAB was created in the 1 ...
from 2004–2005,
where she focused on bioinformatics, biological simulation and developing data analysis/visualization tools. She shared a patent for a data visualization tool designed and developed at the MathWorks. From 2005 to 2007, she serves as the manager of interaction design and visual design team at Autodesk,
working on an architectural design desktop application and responsible for user research and design management. From 2007 to 2010, she worked as a user experience research and design Consultant for
SolidWorks
SolidWorks (stylized as SOLIDWORKS) is a brand of software used for solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE). It was one of the first 3D CAD applications designed to run on a desktop PC.
The brand is owned ...
.
Data Consulting
Serving as a self-employed consultant for data analysis and data visualization at Ghostweather Research & Design, LLC, Cherny has worked on data visualization and analysis problems including creating customer personas from survey data and interviews, visualizing tax brackets, analyzing bug reports and stack traces, clustering pharmaceutical drug reports, network analysis for topic modeling, entity recognition of company names in news articles, and dashboard design.
Teaching
Cherny is currently an associate professor at Emlyon Business School,
[ where she teaches business analytics, Python, text mining, SQL, visualization. From 2015 to 2016, she served as visiting Knight Chair for the Center for Communication, Culture and Change at University of Miami.] She taught data visualization and data analysis and help launching Data Visualization and Journalism track in the School of Communication's Interactive Media department.
Publications
Cherny published a book titled ''Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace'', which looks at women and the new Internet technology and culture features fourteen essays that discuss such issues as gender attitudes, courtship via e-mail, censorship, hacker culture, online harassment.
Cherny's dissertation from Stanford University was an early study on online user-extensible chat community, later published as Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World (CSLI, 1999). She revised this dissertation into a book of the same title ''Conversation and Community: Chat in a Virtual World''.
References
External links
Lynn Cherny's personal website
Lynn Cherny's twitter
Lynn Cherny's LinkedIn
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cherny, Lynn
Data scientists
Women data scientists
American consultants
Academic staff of Emlyon Business School
Stanford University alumni
University System of Maryland alumni
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
Living people
1967 births