Nathan is a research scientist at Adobe Systems, Inc. working on computer graphics related topics and is currently directing a research lab in San Jose. He joined Adobe after completing his PhD. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of John C. Hart. His primary areas of focus have been in rendering, graphics hardware, and geometry processing. His thesis focused on techniques for mesh parameterization with an emphasis on making them useful for accelerating surface processing algorithms on consumer level graphics hardware.

While at Adobe,helped develop the photo-realistic rendering engines shipping both in Adobe Dimension and Photoshop. He co-invented kCurves, the basis for the  a new Curvature Tool shipping in Illustrator and Photoshop.  This a technology was also presented as a paper at SIGGRAPH 2017.  Nathan is currently serving as an associate editor for Computer Graphics forum.  In addition, he served as the co-chair of ACM/Eurographics Sixth Symposium on Sketch-Based Modeling and Interaction.

Prior to Adobe, Nathan spent his summer of 2002 at Nvidia in Santa Clara, California where he worked on their architecture team that designs the new up and coming graphics processors. During his time there, he designed new features for future products while assessing Nvidia’s existing product line with that of their competitor’s.  Has has spent two summers interning at Intel at their Intel Architecture Labs in their 3D software technologies group, which is intended to be an “Idea Factory”, research oriented branch of Intel.