Congratulations to Paul Debevec — Research Associate Professor & Associate Director of Graphics Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies — who won an Academy Award earlier this year for his breakthrough lighting technology work! The Academy of Motion Pictures honored Paul with a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award for “the design and engineering of the Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures.”

Paul shared the honor with colleagues Tim Hawkins of LightStage, LLC, John Monos of Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Mark Sagar of WETA Digital. The light stage technology Paul and his team developed has been used in “Spider-Man 2” and “Avatar.”

Several computer graphics researchers have received this honor in the past, including Loren Carpenter, Ed Catmull, Ron Fedkiw, Pat Hanrahan, Henrik Wann Jensen, Ken Perlin, and Jos Stam.

We’re truly proud of all our winners!

Complete press release about Paul’s award from ACM SIGGRAPH.