SIGGRAPH 2023 Student Research Competition: Baron
Awardee(s):
Award:
- Student Research Competition
Description:
Jessica Baron is a PhD candidate in computer science, Visual Computing at Clemson University, advised by Dr. Eric Patterson. Her research focuses on the acquisition and rendering of feather appearance for computer graphics. She is passionately inspired by the interdisciplinary and international efforts of the computer graphics field to understand more of the physical world and create meaningful works of art. As a commitment to the field, too, she has named her dog Fresnel.
Her professional experience includes both industry and academia. She developed production software at three different studio internships: Wētā FX in Wellington, New Zealand, (starting a new feather-generation tool which she named Apteryx); the RenderMan team at Pixar Animation Studios (implementing the DisneyBsdf Bxdf released in RenderMan 24, mentored by Per Christensen); and the Unreal Engine team at Epic Games (working on the UE5 rendering module). She conducted computer graphics research as a 2020-2021 Fulbrighter at Prof. Wenzel Jakob’s Realistic Graphics Lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and with Prof. Arnulph Fuhrmann at TH Köln in Cologne, Germany.
