Resume for Per H. Christensen

Education

1995:

Ph.D. in computer science, University of Washington. Title of dissertation: "Hierarchical techniques for glossy global illumination". Advisors: David Salesin and Tony DeRose.

1992:

M.S. in computer science, University of Washington. Topic: Color photometric stereo. Advisor: Linda Shapiro.

1990:

M.S. in electrical engineering (civilingeniør, E-linien), Technical University of Denmark. Title of thesis: "Automated synthesis of delay-insensitive circuits". Advisor: Jørgen Staunstrup.

Work in Industry

2001-present:

Principal scientist / senior software developer at Pixar Animation Studios' office in Seattle, Washington. I am part of the RenderMan team, developing new features for Pixar's RenderMan renderer. I've been working mostly on efficient ray tracing, global illumination, ambient occlusion, caustics, 3D textures (point clouds and brick maps), point-based computations, and efficient sampling.

1999-2001:

Senior software engineer at Square USA in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was part of the R&D division, co-developing the in-house Kilauea renderer -- a massively parallel distributed ray tracer able to render extremely complex scenes on a cluster of PCs. The main part of my work was to implement caustics, global illumination, and participating media.

1996-1999:

Research scientist at Mental Images in Berlin, Germany. I was part of the rendering team working on mental ray. Major development projects: flexible contours, fast scanline-based motion blur, anisotropic reflection, caustics, global illumination, participating media. I also maintained and optimized existing code, wrote documentation, and supported beta sites.

Summer 1993:

Programmer at Industrial Light & Magic in San Rafael, California. During this internship I wrote C++ procedures for image processing and improved a prototype for camera-position determination from an image.

Work in Academia

1993-1995:

Research assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Washington. Research in light transport simulation (global illumination) focusing on importance, wavelets, and clustering.

Winter 1992:

Teaching assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Washington. TA for senior-level computer graphics class. Planned excercises, graded, and consulted with students.

Summer 1989:

Research assistant, Technical University of Denmark. Worked on design of the 'Viterbi decoder', a VLSI chip for reliable (error-correcting) satellite communication.

Also, I was doing military service as a paramedic in the Royal Danish Airforce in summer and fall of 1995.

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