He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999. His primary research interests focus on the creation, management, and rendering of visually complex scenes. For the last 10 years, he has been actively involved with developing techniques for automatic surface simplification and approximation, one of the primary results of this work being the widely used QSlim simplification system. More recently, he has worked on problems relating to automatic texture synthesis from example images, out-of core processing of multi-gigabyte meshes, automatic surface parameterization, and visualization of discontinuous Galerkin FEM simulations.