Berthouzoz Women in Research Lunch

August 13

at SIGGRAPH 2025

Posted on 2025-07-25

The Berthouzoz Women in Research Event is an annual networking event organized by WiGRAPH for researchers, faculty, and students. Floraine Berthouzoz started this event as an informal gathering. After her passing in 2015, Floraine’s mentees and colleagues built upon her efforts to create an event that aims to broaden the network of women researchers and provide a friendly and personal environment where graduate students can interact with senior researchers. This year is the 10th anniversary of the Berthouzoz Lunch, and we are looking forward to a lively panel discussion about WiGRAPH’s past, present, and future!

The panel will feature two favorite panelists from past lunches: Jessica Hodgins and Alla Sheffer. The panel will also include two up-and-coming researchers: Ana Dodik and Geonsun Lee. The event is open to all researchers, regardless of gender.

Details

Event Date: Wednesday, August 13 from 12:30–2:00 pm PST.

Location: This event will be co-located with SIGGRAPH at the Pinnacle Hotel Harbourfront Ballroom in Vancouver.

To participate, please register using our RSVP form.

Poster by Camille Yang

Panelists

  • Jessica Hodgins
    Professor
    Carnegie Mellon University

    Jessica Hodgins is a Professor in the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. From 2008-2016, she founded and ran research labs for Disney, rising to VP of Research and leading the labs in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. From 2005-2015, she was Associate Director for Faculty in the Robotics Institute, running the promotion and tenure process and creating a mentoring program for pre-tenure faculty. Prior to moving to Carnegie Mellon in 2000, she was an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. She was editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 2000-2002 and ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Chair in 2003. She was an elected director at large on the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee from 2012-2017 and in 2017 she was elected ACM SIGGRAPH President. Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation, and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion.

  • Alla Sheffer
    Professor
    University of British Columbia

    Alla Sheffer is a professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She investigates algorithms for geometry processing focusing on computer graphics applications. She is particularly interested in leveraging connections between geometry and perception to enable users to create and manipulate geometric content. Prof. Sheffer regularly publishes at selective computer graphics venues and had co-authored 32 papers published in ACM Transactions on Graphics, including numerous papers in SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia proceedings. She holds 5 recent patents on methods for shape communication and hexahedral mesh generation. She received the 2018 Canadian Human Computer Communications Society Achievement Award, multiple faculty awards from Adobe, Google and IBM, a Killam Research Fellowship, an NSERC Discovery Accelerator award, two NSERC Idea to Innovation grants, and an Audi Production Award. She served on the PCs for SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia, Eurographics, and other key graphics conferences; co-chaired the PCs for SGP’06 and IEEE SMI’13, and is a PC co-chair for Eurographics'18. She served on the editorial boards of ACM TOG, IEEE TVCG, Computer Graphics Form, Graphical Models, Computers & Graphics, and CAGD.

  • Ana Dodik
    PhD Student
    MIT

    Ana is a second-year PhD student at MIT EECS, CSAIL advised by Prof. Justin Solomon and Prof. Vincent Sitzmann. She is working on problems at the intersection of graphics, vision, and algorithmic fairness.

  • Geonsun Lee
    PhD Student at University of Maryland

    Geonsun Lee is a Ph.D. Candidate at University of Maryland, College Park, under the supervision of Prof. Dinesh Manocha. Her research focuses on developing interfaces and interactions that enhance multi-user experiences in Extended Reality (XR). She completed her Master's degree in Computer Science and Engineering, following a Bachelor's degree where she double-majored in Business Administration and Computer Science and Engineering, both at Korea University. She has previously interned at Adobe Research, Meta Reality Labs, and Dolby Laboratories.

Organizers

Sponsors

This event is made possible thanks to our sponsors:

  • Platinum: Adobe
  • Gold: Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation
  • Silver: CRA (made possible by a donation from Dr. Adriana Schulz, who contributed the prize from her CRA-WP Early Career Award)