Nathan is a researcher at Adobe Systems, Inc. working on computer graphics related topics. He joined Adobe after completing his Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign under the guidance of John C. Hart. His interests range from image and geometry processing, to computer graphics. 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, he helped develop the Adobe Image Foundation, a GPU accelerated image processing library that became part of the Adobe Flash player. He created ART, the global illumination renderer that is part of Photoshop Extended. He helped port that vector graphics and image filtering portions of the Adobe Flash player to run accelerated on mobile GPU devices. He served as the co-chair of ACM/Eurographics Sixth Symposium on Sketch-Based Modeling and Interaction. He helped develop the Repousse’ 3D modeling system that that is part of Photoshop Extended. He was the co-chair for the Adobe Technology Summit 2011, which was an internal event with an excess of two thousand employees in attendance.

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. In the summer of 2000, he worked closely with Intel’s software graphics team. The team at that time was developing the 3D authoring capabilities of Macromedia (now Adobe) Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio. Much of his work focused on developing real-time simulation techniques for cloth animation. In the summer of 1999 he worked on developing Intel’s IPEAK graphics performance toolkit product with assisted developers in performance tuning, optimizing, and profiling OpenGL applications.