Shneiderman, Ben

Ben Shneiderman was born on August 21, 1947 to Samuel and Eileen Shneiderman. His parents were Polish-born journalists who immigrated to New York from Paris in 1940 with their two-year-old daughter, Helen. While growing up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Shneiderman enjoyed stamp collecting, photography, building electronics projects, and playing baseball.
Shneiderman attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and later the City College of New York (CCNY) from 1964 to 1968. In addition to studying computer science, Shneiderman took psychology courses and served as the yearbook photo editor at CCNY for three years. His uncle, the world-famous photographer David Seymour ("Chim"), influenced him towards photojournalism.
At graduation from the City College of New York, Shneiderman received a fellowship for graduate work at Carnegie-Mellon University but was unable to attend. He spent three years at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Farmingdale (Long Island, New York), teaching Data Processing as a form of national service in lieu of serving in the armed services during the Vietnam War era. In 1969, he was able to travel the world and spend six weeks in an internship at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. Four years later, his work on a graph-theoretic model for optimization of database file structures earned him the first Ph.D. in Computer Science at the State University of New York's new Stony Brook campus. At SUNY Stony Brook, Shneiderman collaborated with fellow graduate student Isaac Nassi to create the now widely used structured flowcharts (Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams).
In early 1973, Shneiderman married Nancy Helman. That summer, the couple moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where Shneiderman became Assistant Professor in the Indiana University Computer Science Department. By 1976, Shneiderman's work was moving towards experimental psychology, and he accepted a position in the Department of Information Systems Management in the University of Maryland's College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. The program was short-lived, and, in 1979, Shneiderman became a member of the Department of Computer Science.
Shneiderman founded the Software Psychology Society in 1976 to bring together researchers who shared similar interests. This group developed the 1982 conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The success of this conference contributed to the formation of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), which remains the main professional organization in this field.
Also in 1982, Shneiderman founded the interdisciplinary Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland.
In June 2001 he married Jenny Preece, who is Chair of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His first marriage ended in 1993.