Pat Hanrahan

Pat Hanrahan is the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. Before joining Stanford, he was a founding employee at Pixar Animation Studios. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Professor Hanrahan is widely considered one of the preeminent researchers in the field of computer graphics, Hanrahan developed a computer program at Pixar called Renderman to simulate the image-generation process. Renderman mathematically models a camera, as well as light sources and the interaction of light with different materials. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received two Academy Awards (Oscars) in 1993 (for Jurassic Park) and 2004 for his technical achievements in film. In addition to PIXAR, he has founded two companies, Tableau and PeakStream, and served on the technical advisory boards of NVIDIA, Exluna, Neoptica, VSee and Procedural.