Aleks Aris got his PhD from the Computer Science Dept. at the University of Maryland, College Park in the Human-Computer Interaction field. He worked there with Ben Shneiderman on network visualization, specifically on Network Visualization by Semantic Substrates. Previously, he worked on the TimeSearcher 2 and Treemap projects. He was a research intern at Microsoft Research in the summer of 2004 and worked on visualizing trips in the MyLifeBits project. Aleks Aris was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award in 2003, given to one graduate teaching assistant in the department every year. He ranked 2nd out of approx. 120 people when he graduated with a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering and a minor in Psychology, from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. In the 1996 nationwide university entrance exam of Turkey, out of approx. 1,500,000 participants, he ranked 26th nationwide.