Presenter

Mary Whitton studied at both Duke and NC State and had a distinguished 25-year career as a research professor at UNC Chapel Hill. She got involved with interactive computer graphics in 1976, in John Staudhammer’s lab at NC State. She was a co-founder of Ikonas Graphics Systems (1978) and Trancept Systems (1987). These companies’ products were high-end user-programmable hardware with software libraries for graphics, image processing, volume rendering, and visualization. At UNC she co-led the Effective Virtual Environments research group, and she received the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (VGTC) Virtual Reality Career Award in 2021. She was Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH organization 1993-1995 and received the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award in 2013.