Julie Dorsey is a Professor of Computer Science at Yale University, where she teaches computer graphics. She came to Yale in 2002 from MIT, where she held tenured appointments in both the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the School of Architecture. She received undergraduate degrees in architecture and graduate degrees in computer science from Cornell University.
With architecture as a driving application, Julie Dorsey has studied a wide range of problems in computer graphics, including sketch-based interfaces for early conceptual design, acceleration methods for real-time rendering, and the creation of detailed photorealistic renderings. Her contributions also include algorithms for lighting and acoustical design and visualization. She is particularly well known for her research in modeling the appearance of materials -- for example, she pioneered techniques to model the visual richness of irregular metal patinas and eroded stone. Her current research interests include photorealistic image synthesis, material and texture models, illustration techniques, and interactive visualization of complex scenes, with an application to urban environments.
In addition to serving on numerous conference program committees, she is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics and an editorial-board member for Computers and Graphics and Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision, and was Papers Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 2006. She has received several professional awards, including MIT's Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, a National Science Foundation Career Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. She is a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard (2010-11) and the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale (2010-12). Together with two of her colleagues, she recently helped establish the new Computing and the Arts major at Yale.