Bioinformaticist Holly Bik was particularly interested in broadening the ability of metagenomics researchers to take advantage of data visualization in order to explore and understand population distributions. With Sloan support, Bik developed Phinch, a web-based visualization platform that easily integrates with common tools like QIIME. This grant provides three years of funding to Bik to scale up Phinch and grow its user base into a sustainable community-supported software project. Her plan is to begin with a user workshop to refine already-collected requirements from existing users and metagenomics pipeline maintainers, then move back into active development. The technical goals laid out for the platform include the integration of statistical tools into visualization interfaces, an important step to help researchers move from exploration of data through visualization into more robust analysis.