When Yong Wang recently received one of the highest honors for early-career data visualization researchers, it marked a milestone in an extraordinary journey that began far from the world’s technology hubs.Wang was born in a small farming village in southern China to parents with limited formal education. Today the IEEE member and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics is an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Data Science atNanyang Technological University, in Singapore. He studies how people can employdata visualization techniques to get more out of large-scale datasets as well as advanced artificial intelligence techniques.“Visualization helps people understand complex ideas,” he says. “If we design these tools well, they can make advanced technologies accessible to everyone.”For his work in the field, theIEEE Computer Society visualization and graphics technical committee presented him with its 2025 Significant New Researcher Award. The recognition highlights his growing influence in fields including data visualization, human-computer interaction and human-AI collaboration—areas becoming more important as the world generates more data than humans can easily interpret.