About Me

After having spent 5 years at the School of Computing at the University of Utah my committee signed off on my Ph.D. dissertation in the autumn of 2002. The degree was awarded officially, in May 2003. My advisor was Richard F. Riesenfeld, My other departmental committee members were Elaine Cohen, Peter Shirley, and Frank Stenger. My external committee member was Tom Lyche (at the University of Oslo)

While at Utah, I worked in the Geometric Design and Computation research group, and I was also affiliated with the Visual Simulation Group. My research has been partially funded by the NSF Graphics and Visualization Center.

In November of 2002, I accepted the position of Associate Research Specialist in the School of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. I went there in order to work with James Arvo , one of the most brilliant people I have ever had the pleasure to interact with. However, thanks in part to California budget woes our funding ended in May of 2004. I continued the appointment but "without pay" through the end of 2004; part of this time I was funded as an adjunct researcher back at Utah through the generosity of Peter Shirley.

At the present time I am in search of an assitant professorship position in which my time can be split between teaching and research.

Research

My PhD. research involved the mathematical foundations of computer graphics, particularly in closed-form analytical solutions to irradiance problems. Since then I have branched out into other areas of rendering, including surface reflectance and transport theory for global illumination. I have also worked on the tone reproduction problem.

Incidentally, I use the name "Michael M. Stark" on my publications because there is another "Michael Stark" in graphics (who, coincidentally, even looks a bit like me).

Education

I started in the Ph.D. program at Utah in September of 1997, was admitted to candidacy in September of 2000, defended in 2002, and after some thesis office beauracracy my degree was officially awarded in the spring of 2003. I hold two other degrees: My graduate work at Washington emphasized complex analysis and celestial mechanics. I worked with Don Marshall and my master's work was supervised by Robin Graham. I also had the pleasure of taking several courses in polytope theory from Branko Grunbaum.

Personal Stuff

Mike Stark