Significant New Researcher Award

The significant new research award is given to a researcher who has made a recent, significant contribution to the field of computer graphics and is new to the field (i.e., received their Ph.D. or the equivalent up to seven years ago). The intent is to recognize people who have already made a notable contribution very early in their careers and are likely to make more. The award includes a $1,000 cash prize.

Current Recipient

ACM SIGGRAPH is pleased to present the 2022 Significant New Researcher Award to Felix Heide for his work on imaging hardware, computational imaging methods, and the end-to-end optimization of computational imaging systems.

Felix’s research focuses on camera systems: combining novel optics, exotic camera hardware, and sophisticated computational methods to design camera systems with higher performance or with novel capabilities. His work is notable for making contributions across many stages of the imaging pipeline, from designing optical elements to devising new imaging modalities, learning and tuning image-processing computations, and even proposing novel optical designs and algorithms for holographic displays. In addition to improving each of these stages individually, Felix and his students have also created new tools and strategies for optimizing the imaging pipeline as a whole, including languages and tools for efficient optimization and an end-to-end learning framework for producing high-quality images that are appropriate for a specific task.  For example, he recently learned to how to design a nanophotonic metalens for broadband light so that its image quality is comparable to conventional refractive lenses. This is just one example: his work has a broad range of applications, including depth sensing, transient imaging, autonomous driving, seeing beyond the line of sight, seeing through rain and snow, and displaying images using computer generated holograms.

Felix leads the Computational Imaging Lab at Princeton University. He obtained his BS and MS from the University of Siegen and his PhD from the University of British Columbia, where his doctoral dissertation won the Alain Fournier PhD Dissertation Award and the SIGGRAPH Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He completed his postdoc at Stanford University and has been at Princeton since 2020.

Nomination Procedure

ACM SIGGRAPH members are encouraged to nominate individuals for the Significant New Researcher Award by sending an email to the Technical Awards Chair (technical_awards@siggraph.org) by January 31 of each year.

Requirements 

Your nomination should describe a candidate’s most significant research contribution and its impact. The Technical Awards Committee uses nomination statements as the main basis for their selections, so a concise and clear statement is strongly encouraged.