School of IC Honors Decorated Professor with Namesake Award

One word comes up more often than others when describing John Stasko — kindness.

Stasko achieved a great deal during his 36 years as a professor at Georgia Tech and made significant contributions to data visualization research and innovations. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community Lifetime Achievement Award.

In all those years, none of his students or colleagues could recall a moment when he didn’t demonstrate kindness.

“He supported me in fleshing out my ideas into a Ph.D. dissertation,” said Dean Jerding (CS Ph.D. 1997), one of Stasko’s former students. “He was always calm and communicated any criticism in a very positive way. He never said I had a dumb idea. He was always encouraging, and he redirected you with his input.”

The School of Interactive Computing bid farewell to Stasko on Thursday, following his official retirement in July.