Biography

Towards the finish of my Ph.D. work at Stanford, writing a fluid solver to study cloud top instabilities, I saw a talk on how ILM brought dinosaurs to the big screen in Jurassic Park. I found my calling, and moved to LA, where DreamWorks was starting an animation studio.

On my first movie, Prince of Egypt, I used a fluid solver that I wrote to create smoke simulations, discussed in a SIGGRAPH paper. Fluid sim work has been a constant thread in my work, at DreamWorks, Disney, Sony, Method, and most recently Pixar. I've had many roles, working on 26 feature length movies, as a programmer, an effects artist, an effects lead, and an effects supervisor.

After developing the fire pipeline at Sony for the movie Ghost Rider, I specialized in fire simulations and explosions. The culmination of my VFX and animation career was Pixar's movie Elemental, where I helped develop the fire character simulation rig, which all fire characters used.

I've recently started an AI adventure at Duality Robotics.