As usual, we will have two invited speakers this year, one internal and one external. They have been chosen by popular vote.

Prof. Dr. Peter Schröder

California Institute of Technology

Peter Schröder is a professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics at California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He obtained his doctoral degree in 1994 from Princeton University, under the supervision of Patrick M. Hanrahan. He is member of the faculty of Caltech since 1995. Prof. Schröder was Eistein Visiting Fellow at TU Berlin. He obtained various awards, most notably being the ACM/SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement award in 2003 and the Humboldt Research Prize in 2006. He is ACM Fellow since 2015.

His research interests are the design of efficient and reliable algorithms for problems in computer graphics, including geometrical modeling, numerical algorithms, and physical simulations, as well as discrete differential geometry.

For more information, visit his webpage here.

Prof. Dr. Chris Wendl

Humboldt University of Berlin

Chris Wendl is professor for Differential Geometry and Global Analysis at Humboldt University of Berlin. He received his PhD from New York University in 2005, under the supervision of Helmut Hofer. He worked as a postdoc at MIT, LMU München, ETH Zürich, and HU Berlin, before becoming a lecturer at University College London. He returned in 2016 to HU Berlin as a professor, position that he is currently holding.

His research focuses on symplectic and contact topology, particularly the theory of pseudoholomorphic curves, applications to contact manifolds, and symplectic field theory.

More information can be found on his webpage.