About
I am a Teaching Professor and the Associate Director of Academics in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I teach courses in computer graphics, scientific visualization, game development, and virtual reality. In 2024 I received the Grainger College of Engineering’s Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the Scott H. Fisher Computer Science Teaching Award.
My current work centers on immersive technologies and games for learning, including VR laboratories for electromagnetism, general relativity, and materials crystallography, and decision-making games for engineering education. I collaborate with colleagues in physics, engineering, and the sciences. Before joining the teaching faculty, I was a research scientist and assistant director in Illinois’s Computational Science and Engineering program, working with Boeing, Caterpillar, ExxonMobil, and the Department of Energy on large-scale mesh processing and visualization. I received my PhD in Computer Science from Illinois in 2005, advised by Michael Garland.
Interests: Computer graphics · Scientific visualization · Virtual and augmented reality · Game development · Geometric mesh processing · Computing education
News
- Promoted to Teaching Professor.
- Best Practices for Assessing Students’ Programming Skills in the Era of Large Language Models appears at ACM ICER 2026.
- Appointed Associate Director of Academics in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science.
- Named to the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students (Summer 2025).
- Two papers at ISVC 2024: VR visualization of gravitational-wave polarization, and hybrid voxel formats for ray tracing.
- Received the Grainger College of Engineering Rose Award for Teaching Excellence and the Scott H. Fisher Computer Science Teaching Award.
- FocusFlow: Leveraging Focal Depth for Gaze Interaction in Virtual Reality presented at ACM CHI 2024.
- Patent application filed: Gaze-depth Interaction in Virtual, Augmented, or Mixed Reality.