Hi, I’m Frank Elavsky

During my PhD, I had collaborations with wonderful folks at Highsoft’s Highcharts 📊, Apple , Adobe, Fizz Studio, SRI, UW-Madison’s WGNHS, Northwestern University’s MLDS, Quansight Labs, FiveThirtyEight, tldraw, Visa, and Microsoft.

I was formerly a W3C invited expert in data visualization in the ARIA Working Group and currently still volunteer my time with other efforts.

Before embarking on a PhD I was a staff design systems engineer at Visa on their Data Experience team and lead contributor to the accessibility efforts of their first open source library, Visa Chart Components. We were able to do some pretty extraordinary things together and I am fortunate to have worked alongside such world-class folks.

Prior to Visa I had a high-octane 2 years at Northwestern University working for Research Computing Services providing data visualization support to over two dozen research projects across a wide range of disciplines. Several of my projects won awards and have been featured in over 60 research publications (including the privilege of being uncredited in the 2017 Nobel Lecture on Physics), 100+ web articles, 4 PhD theses, 4 graduate courses, and 9 textbooks.

In my early career (before Northwestern), I worked in federal policy analyzing large, complex medicare/medicaid datasets and building visualization tools for lawyers and policymakers.

And before I had a “career” in any singular sense (which I embarked on when I graduated undergrad in 2016), I worked many different jobs since as far back as age 7 (with only 1 gap where I wasn’t working at least some job on the side or sick from disability). Most of these are part-time, overlapping, and off and on; they’re listed in reverse chronological order based on the last time I did that job: institutional research intern (1yr), barista (9yrs), community organizer (3yrs), night security (2yrs), editor (1.5yrs), Greek and English tutor (2yrs), professional and volunteer youth worker (4yrs), assistant manager of a pottery/fused glass workshop (2yrs), toy store clerk (2yrs), small business owner (2yrs), carpenter and residential painter (3yrs), furniture mover (2yrs), commissioned artist (0.5yrs), pizza maker (1.5yrs), doughboy and dishrat (2yrs), confectioner’s apprentice (1.5yrs), and paperboy (7yrs).

I won “paperboy of the quarter” in Q1 of 2004 and subsequently quit the following quarter. I still have the plaque! My mom first got me that job (initially under her name, since employing a 7 year old is definitely against child labor laws). She was very pro- when it came to child labor. There were about 1.5 years between age 14 (in ‘04) and my first wage job at 15.5 where I didn’t have any job. Consequently, that was also the time I assembled my first coherent draft of Braven, which I had started working on in ‘02 (and still work on, to this day).

Despite all of this, I am definitely anti- “hustle culture.” 7 year olds shouldn’t be delivering papers. And when I wasn’t working for that tiny window in my childhood, I gave life to my favorite, longest-running hobby: writing fiction. I look forward to many future nights, weekends, and years of my life where I’m not laboring quite as much. All the best things I’ve done in my life didn’t make any money at all.