Commonwealth Club: Tony Derose, Lead Scientist at Pixar

Senior Scientist and Research Group Lead at Pixar Animation Studio, Tony Derose, will take audience members behind the scenes of Pixar and explain how wide arrays of math topics are central to Pixar’s film production process. To help make math, science, and engineering more relevant and inspiring for students, Derose will highlight Pixar’s Young Maker’s Program and other important educational initiatives that the company is currently involved in.

As Senior Scientist, Derose is responsible for helping create the technology behind Pixar’s groundbreaking animation. In 1998, he was a major contributor to the Oscar-winning short film "Geri's Game."  From 1986 to 1995, Dr. DeRose was a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He has received numerous awards for his work including a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for his work on surface representations in 2006, the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 1999, and the Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1989.

He received a BS in physics in from the University of California, Davis, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

--Commonwealth Club