Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) Harvard University

Hanspeter Pfister received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1996 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and his M.S. in electrical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1991. Before joining the Harvard faculty as Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, he worked for 11 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. His research lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision and spans a range of topics including scientific visualization, point-based graphics, appearance modeling, face recognition, and computational photography. He is the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s real-time volume-rendering hardware for PCs. Pfister has taught courses at major graphics conferences including ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualization, and Eurographics. Chair of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) and editor of the 2006 NIH/NSF Visualization Research Challenges report, he is a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society and member of ACM, ACM SIGGRAPH, and the Eurographics Association. During the IIC’s life as an Interfaculty Initiative, Pfister served as Director of Visual Computing.