Bio and CV

"Read no history --- nothing but biography, for that is life without theory." - Benjamin Disraeli

| Full CV in PDF (updated in December 2023) |

Hao (Richard) Zhang is a full professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Canada. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, holds a Distinguished University Professorship, and is an Amazon Scholar. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Shenzhen University, and the Beijing Film Academy. Richard obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto (supervisor: Eugene Fiume), and Master of Math (supervisor: John Brzozowski) and Bachelor of Math degrees from the University of Waterloo, all in computer science. He directs the GrUVi (Graphics U Vision) lab at SFU. His research is in computer graphics and visual computing with special interests in geometric modeling, shape analysis, 3D vision, geometric deep learning, as well as computational design and fabrication. He has published more than 180 papers on these topics, including 65+ articles in SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, and ACM Trans. on Graphics, the most prestigious venue in computer graphics, as well as four US patents. Methods from three of his papers on geometry processing have been adopted by CGAL, the open-source Computational Geometry Algorithms Library.

Richard has served as an editor-in-chief for Computer Graphics Forum, an associate editor-in-chief for IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications (CG&A), and an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics, IEEE Trans. on Visualization and Graphics, Graphical Models, among others. He has served on the Program Committees or as Area Chairs for major conferences in both computer graphics and vision. He is SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Technical Papers Assistant Chair, SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 course chair, a paper co-chair for SGP 2013, GI 2015, and CGI 2018, and a conference chair for International Geometry Summit 2019. Richard will be SIGGRAPH Technical Papers Chair of SIGGRAPH in 2025.

Awards and honours received by Richard include

IEEE Fellow, for contributions to shape analysis and synthesis in visual computing, 2024.
Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society (CHCCS) Achievement Award in computer graphics, 2022.
Distinguished SFU Professor, awarded in 2020.
Google Faculty Research Award (top 16%), 2019-2020.
National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Overseas Outstanding Young Researcher Award (top 25%), 2015.
NSERC DAS (Discovery accelerator Supplement) Award (top 4%), 2014.
Faculty of Applied Sciences (FAS) Research Excellence Award at SFU, 2014.
Alumni Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies (1 awarded for graduates with master degree), University of Waterloo, 1997.
NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, 1998-1999.
Ontario Graduate Scholarship for Science and Technology, 1997 and 2001.
Rene Descartes Fellowship, University of Waterloo, 1991-1995.

He and his students and collaborators have won several Best Paper/Dataset Awards, including

CVPR Best Student Paper Award, by BSP-Net for neural implicit 3D modeling using compact meshes, 2020.
Best Dataset Award from ChinaGraph, by 3D-FRONT (ICCV), a large 3D indoor scene dataset, 2021.
Best Paper Award at CAD/Graphics, for co-creative 3D modeling, 2017.
Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP) Best Paper Award, on surface sampling and intrinsic Voronoi diagrams, 2008.

In addition, two of Richard's SIGGRAPH papers, LOGAN and GRASS, had been selected (among 6 out of 100+) for press release at SIGGRAPH Asia 2019 and SIGGRAPH 2017, respectively.

For his university service, Richard received the SFU Dean of Graduate Studies Awards for Excellence in Leadership in 2016.

Richard is privileged to have worked with many excellent students. Awards and honours won by his students include the Alain Fournier Best Graphics Thesis Award (twice: Ibraheem Alhashim in 2015 and then Zhiqin Chen in 2024), Asia Graphics Young Researcher Award, National Science Fund for Outstanding and Excellent Young Scholars in China (1 杰青, 2 优青), Azrieli Postdoc Fellowship, SFU Govenor's Gold Medal, and winners/finalists in Google, NVidia and Adobe PhD Fellowships. Major companies where his students have interned or are working at include Adobe, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), Google, Huawei, and NVidia.