Dr. Zoran Popović

Biography

Zoran Popović is a Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he directs the Center for Game Science. He is the founder and Chief Scientist of Enlearn. Zoran received his Bachelor of Science with Honors from Brown University, and both his Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. His doctoral dissertation focused on automatic synthesis and transformation for realistic character animation. Zoran’s research interests primarily lie in computer graphics and interactive games, with a focus on scientific discovery through gameplay, learning games, high-fidelity human modeling and animation, and controlling realistic natural motion. Notably, he led the team that produced Foldit, a biochemistry game whose outcomes were published in Nature. Zoran has been a member of the University of Washington faculty since 1999 and has held research positions at Sun Microsystems and the Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. His contributions to the field of computer graphics have been recognized with several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.

Research Interests

Experience