Ronald Metoyer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is also the Assistant Dean of Diversity and Special Initiatives in the College of Engineering. In this position, he strives to support the College and the University as a whole to maintain excellence in all aspects of scholarship by leveraging diversity of thought. Such diversity can only come from people with varying life experiences in all aspects including gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc. In his role as Assistant Dean, he works  to support efforts to build a diverse faculty and student body, and to support faculty and students as they strive for success at Notre Dame.

Ronald received his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology where he worked in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center with a focus on modeling and visualizing the motion of pedestrians in urban and architectural scenes.   In 2001, he joined the faculty in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University and in 2002 he received an NSF CAREER Award for his work in “Understanding the Complexities of Animated Content”.   After 14 years at Oregon State University, Dr. Metoyer joined the University of Notre Dame as an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Engineering.  Dr. Metoyer’s research falls under the general area of Human Computer Interaction with an emphasis on Information Visualization. He studies end users with data analysis and general computing problems, identifies their needs, designs, builds and evaluates interfaces that support them directly rather than force them to change their ways to match the machine and existing approaches. He is especially interested in complex data analysis problems where there are opportunities to take advantage of the human perceptual system to help people make sense of their data through visual analysis.