Phone: 305.284.3220
Office: Room 2022, Frances L. Wolfson Building
Alberto Cairo joined the School of Communication of the University of Miami in 2012, and is currently the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism and Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Management teaching classes on visualization and information graphics. He holds MA and PhD degrees from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Spain, and has been a lecturer and professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (2005-2009). He was also the James H. Shumaker term assistant professor at UNC between 2008 and 2009.
He is the author of the books How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter About Visual Information, (W. W. Norton, 2019), The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Peachpit Press/Pearson Education, 2016), and The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization (Peachpit Press/Pearson Education, 2012). He is working on a fourth book, to be published by Wiley in 2021.
Dr. Cairo has an extensive career in the news industry. He has been director of infographics of El Mundo online (Spain, 2000-2005), and Editora Globo (Brazil, 2010-2011), and in the past decade he has consulted for companies and educational institutions in more than twenty countries, besides organizing workshops and other training programs for them. He constantly engages with the data science and statistics communities through articles and conferences, like the one showcased here:”Storytelling, journalism, visualization, and science: A discussion in Nature Methods“, published by Nature Methods magazine. He has also be the keynote speaker at the North American Cartographic Information Society annual meeting, Microsoft’s Data Summit, the Swiss Statistical Society Summit, the Federal Reserve’s Decisions with Data Conference, or the Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy.
In 2012, Dr. Cairo designed the first journalism Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) ever created, titled “Introduction to Infographics and Data Visualization”, in collaboration with the Knight Center for the Americas, in Texas. In its five editions since its inception, this online course has been followed by tens of thousands of students from more 150 countries.
