Brian Curless, Professor, joined the Computer Science and Engineering faculty at the University of Washington in January 1998. He earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Though he was also pre-med as an undergrad, he decided to stick with his more mathematical leanings, and embarked on a brief career as an electrical engineer. After a year of designing and implementing parallel processor DSP algorithms and custom printed circuit boards at SRI International, he returned to grad school and earned his M.S. (1991) and Ph.D. (1997) degrees at Stanford. He did his thesis research on 3D range scanning, which opened the door for working on the Digital Michelangelo Project at Stanford. After laying some of the groundwork for this project in the latter half of 1997, he spent the winter of 1999 in Florence to scan some of the great sculptures of Michelangelo.
Professor Curless's research interests span a number of areas in computer graphics and vision, including multi-view stereo, computational photography, range scanning, surface shape and appearance reconstruction and modeling, human shape modeling, and physics-based modeling of object and character deformation. Outside of academia, he enjoys globe-trotting, badminton, billiards, and beer (previously a homebrewer, he now mostly enjoys the microbrews of the Northwest).