Author

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 NCState. 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 1997-2016. 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, received the ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award in 2013, and was elected to the SIGGRAPH Academy in 2024.