Jock D. Mackinlay (born August 16, 1952) is an American information visualization expert and Vice President of Research and Design at Tableau Software.
[1] Jock Mackinlay was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and received his BA in mathematics and computer science from UC Berkeley in 1975 and his PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1986, where he pioneered the automatic design of graphical presentations of relational information.
Much of the fruits of this research can be seen in his 1999 published book, Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, written and edited with Stuart Card and Ben Shneiderman.
[1] In 2000, Mackinlay took a year-long sabbatical from Xerox PARC to work as a visiting professor at Aarhus University in Denmark,[2] where he taught courses in Information Visualization and User Interfaces of Mobile Devices (co-taught with Polle Zellweger).
Stolte and Hanrahan had extended Mackinlay's dissertation to a formal specification language that combines query, analysis, and visualization into a single framework.