ORGANIZERS: Amy Banic, Patrick O’Leary, and Bireswar Laha

Amy Ulinski Banic, University of Wyoming and Idaho National Laboratory

http://www.cs.uwyo.edu/faculty/abanic.html

BIO: Amy Banic is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wyoming and holds a joint appointment at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). She is founder and director of the 3D Interaction and Agents (3DiA) research lab at UWYO. Her research focuses on 3D User Interfaces for Virtual Environments, Immersive Visualizations, and Virtual Humans, primarily in bimanual and multi-modal interaction. Prior, she was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Virtual Environments Group at Clemson University. Dr. Banic received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the UNC at Charlotte (2008), and B.S. in CS and B.A. in Art from Duquesne University (2003).

Patrick O’Leary, Kitware, Inc.

http://www.kitware.com

BIO: Dr. O'Leary completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of Wyoming under the direction of Dr. Myron B. Allen III in 1999. His dissertation involved stochastic modeling of groundwater contaminant transport entitled "Mathematical Modeling of Variably Absorbing Contaminants in Porous Media." He then served in a postdoctoral position at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, under the supervision of Dr. Richard E. Ewing. Currently, Dr. O'Leary is the Assistant Director of Scientific Computing for Kitware, Inc. His research interests include high performance computing (HPC), numerical analysis, finite elements and visualization.

Bireswar Laha, Virginia Tech

http://people.cs.vt.edu/blaha/

BIO:

Bireswar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. He works in the 3DI group of the Center for Human Computer Interaction, under the guidance of Professor Doug Bowman. His research interests broadly include virtual reality, 3D interaction, and scientific visualization. His dissertation research explores how immersive virtual reality, and novel 3D interaction can improve the effectiveness of volume data analysis (coming from various domains like medical biology, paleontology, biomechanics, etc). His PhD dissertation research is recognized by a $500K NSF HCC award from 2013–16, an IBM PhD Fellowship 2013-14, and a Pratt Fellowship.