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Stephen Marschner
"There was a point in my undergraduate career when I realized I should stop fighting the fact that I love playing with computers," says Marschner, now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. "When I first started at Brown, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do computer science or physics. But it became clear that even though the natural sciences fascinate me, computer science is what really drew me in, where I really loved the work. As it turns out, I’ve ended up working in the corner of computer graphics that’s right next to physics, and so I’ve gone on to learn a lot more about science later in my career." After Brown, Marschner came to Cornell, finishing his PhD in 1998 and moving on to Hewlett Packard Labs, Microsoft Research, and the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford, where he wrote software for the Digital Michelangelo Project. He’s familiar with the high-profile applications of these graphics in computer animated movies like Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story, and, in his own work, Marschner concentrates on realism, writing algorithms to reproduce the effects on light interacting with natural materials. Since computing images of Michelangelo’s greatest marble sculptures, he’s focused on the properties of milk, wood, and his current challenge, human skin and hair. "I’m drawn to images," says Marschner, whose wife works as a graphic designer and whose young daughter is starting to play with crayons. "I’m interested in the appearance of things, and it affects how I see the real world. It can drive people crazy sometimes, because I can’t have dinner in a nice restaurant without thinking about all the patterns that are caused by the refraction of the candlelight through the wine glasses." |
When he was in elementary school, Stephen Marschner convinced his parents that if he could save $100, they should pay for the rest of a new Apple II computer. He did, they did, and he’s been working with computers ever since.