Design Tech Faculty

Patrick Fitzgerald - Mentor and Professor

Pat Fitzgerald Website: www4.ncsu.edu/~pfitz/

Prior to joining the faculty of the College of Design at NC State University, Professor Patrick FitzGerald served as an instructor, artist and manager at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine.

His work has been exhibited across the United States and Japan. As director of the IntelliMedia Initiative for the College of Design, FitzGerald's research and teaching span the full range of multimedia production, from digital video to interactive 3D animation.

Professor FitzGerald has received national and international awards for his digital illustrations. In 1999, he received a North Carolina Fellowship for the Visual Arts. In 1998 he participated in NCAE 99 with the IDM team.

Christopher Healey - Mentor and Associate Professor

Chris Healey Website: www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey

Healey is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, with a specialization in computer graphics. He was a recipient of National Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellowship for doctoral degree research. Healey completed his postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Healey received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for research in perception and visualization in 2001. His current research interests include scientific and information visualization, computer graphics, human perception, artificial intelligence techniques for mixed-initiative interaction, data compression, navigation in virtual worlds, and the role of aesthetics in information representation.

Healey received the Department of Computer Science Outstanding New Teacher Award in 1999. He also received the North Carolina State University Outstanding Teacher Award in 2003, together with Membership to the North Carolina State University Academy of Outstanding Teachers, the most prestigious teaching accomplishment recognized by the university. Healey’s current projects include the study and application of human perception for visualization of large, multidimensional datasets, assisted navigation in large virtual worlds, data compression techniques for simplifying massive databases, artificial intelligence techniques for the automated construction of perceptually optimal visualizations, and the application of Impressionist techniques for generating nonphotorealistic visualizations.

Benjamin Watson - Mentor and Associate Professor

Ben Watson Website: designgraphics.ncsu.edu/pages/watsonb

Ben Watson has worked in the Computer Science department at North Carolina State University since January, 2006. Previously, he worked at Northwestern University's Computer Science department before the College decided to merge it once more with the ECE department, creating the new EECS department. Before Northwestern, he worked at the University of Alberta's Department of Computing Science, where he was on the faculty since the summer of 1997.

Watson completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in August, 1997 under the supervision of Dr. Larry Hodges at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. He worked in the interdisciplinary Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center. Besides Dr. Hodges, the members of his committee were Neff Walker, Bill Ribarsky, Jarek Rossignac, and Greg Turk, all of whom taught Watson a great deal. He earned his Masters degree in CS at Georgia Tech in the summer of 1989. Watson received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine in 1987. He has also studied at the University of Stuttgart, the University of Mannheim, and the Goethe Institut in Bonn.

Michael Young - mentor and Associate Professor

Michael Young Website: liquidnarrative.csc.ncsu.edu/rmy/Home.html

Michael Young is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His interests center around the use of artificial intelligence techniques in virtual worlds like computer games. His work involves research on planning and plan recognition, natural language generation, computer games and computational models of narrative.

Michael's current research interests are in artificial intelligence, planning algorithms, discourse generation and computational models of interactive narrative. Michael directs the Liquid Narrative research group, is the co-director of the NCSU Center for Digital Entertainment and is director of the North Carolina Serious Games Initiative. He’s also the editor in chief of the Journal of Game Development. Michael's group distributes the Zocalo system for intelligent control of interactive virtual environments.