An Academy Award winner, Jim Kajiya began his career as a hardware designer. He worked for Quad Eight Electronics where he designed automated mix-down equipment and SMPTE time-code synchronizers. He then joined Evans and Sutherland as the project engineer for its frame buffer – the first commercially-available random access frame buffer.

Dr. Kajiya received his doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah and spent 15 years at the California Institute of Technology, working as an assistant and associate professor of computer science. He has published many papers on mathematical models for computer vision, high-level programming languages and mathematical logic for computer science. Dr. Kajiya spent several years as the senior researcher at Microsoft Research and is currently a Distinguished Engineer & General Manager of Microsoft Research. His recent work has focused on very high-quality computer graphics, graphic hardware design and developing programming languages.

In 1991, he received the SIGGRAPH Technical Achievement Award and was awarded an Academy Award (technical certificate) in 1997. Dr. Kajiya has served on the external advisory board of the Defense Mapping Agency, the National Neurocircuitry Database Committee for the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine, as well as the SIGGRAPH executive committee