By Charlotte Brookins 

Meliza Wise, a senior business intelligence architect in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, took first place at the University of Iowa portion of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Data Viz Championship, allowing her to compete against other Big Ten staff and faculty members. 

Although Wise didn’t get the most votes in the final round of the competition, she says she is grateful for the opportunity to compete and learn alongside other institutions. 

“This was our way of showing that the data visualization tools we have made are being used and valued,” says Wise, who is a member of the college’s technology services team. “It was so fun to showcase the level of user engagement from our senior leaders.” 

2024 was the opening year of BTAA’s Data Viz Championship, which is a competition encouraging staff, faculty, and students from different Big Ten schools to show their skills in data visualization to viewers around the country. The event is part of the organization’s Love Data Week, which celebrates all things relating to the collection and presentation of data. 

Faculty and staff participants were asked to present a visualization of already-existing data from their university, while students were provided with a data set to visualize.  

“My presentation was an interactive visualization of how technology service dashboards are being used,” says Wise, who has worked at the University of Iowa for 15 years. “Using four different kinds of charts, it shows who uses the dashboard, when they use it, how often it is used, and what information they’re trying to get from it.” 

Having used the program Tableau for data visualization throughout her career at the university, Wise says she enjoyed applying those skills to the competition. Even before transferring to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wise says she frequently created analyses for business intelligence at University of Iowa Health Care, internal medicine, and more.  

For her, the competition was another way to enhance and improve upon skills she already had. 

Wise adds she was happy to represent the university at the competition and get a glimpse at the data visualization skills of other Big Ten institutions, as well as have the opportunity to collaborate with other data analysts across universities. 

“This event was a great team booster for CLAS!” she adds. “I’m happy to have participated.”