Desiree Abbott

Desirée Abbott has been a data visualization professional since 2016. Hailing from a very well-rounded background running the gamut from a wee bit of art and business to science and analytics, she is at ease communicating with a myriad of different types of people. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Purdue University and a master’s degree in Physics from the University of California in Davis.

From a very young age, Desirée has nurtured a love for making pretty things, so she finds data visualization to be the perfect marriage of the mathematical and technical with the creative and beautiful. Since fleeing a PhD program with a master’s degree, she held positions in various product analytics teams, business intelligence teams, and software engineering teams before becoming a consultant in 2022 and setting out as a freelancer in 2023. She is also the instructor for a successful and highly rated course on Coursera, the first in an introductory five-course specialization about learning data visualization with Tableau, produced at the University of California in Davis. She has run various data viz workshops, including one for the Water Resource Control Board at the State of California.

Desirée currently resides in the East Bay outside San Francisco, California, with her husband and their fur babies. When she’s not working, she likes to crochet and play piano, tries not to kill her plants, and plays Dungeons & Dragons weekly with her husband and a close group of friends.