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DBH 4214
about me

I am an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and co-direct UCI's Interactive Graphics & Visualization Lab (iGravi). Before joining UCI, I was a postdoctoral associate at MIT. I obtained my Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2014. I received the NSF CAREER award in 2023.

My group works mainly in physics-based computer graphics and scientific computing with a focus on modeling and simulating light transport in complex environments. Additionally, we aim to develop efficient solutions to the inverse problems centered around the inference of geometric or material properties from physical or simulated measurements.

Perspective students/visitors: If you are interested in working with me, please check this page.

recent publications
Image-Space Adaptive Sampling for Fast Inverse Rendering
Kai Yan, Cheng Zhang, Sébastien Speierer, Guangyan Cai, Yufeng Zhu, Zhao Dong, Shuang Zhao
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 (conference-track full paper), August 2025
Unbiased Differential Visibility Using Fixed-Step Walk-on-Spherical-Caps And Closest Silhouettes
Lifan Wu, Nathan Morrical, Sai Bangaru, Rohan Sawhney, Shuang Zhao, Chris Wyman, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Aaron Lefohn
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2025), 44(4), August 2025
Guiding-Based Importance Sampling for Walk on Stars
Tianyu Huang, Jingwang Ling, Shuang Zhao, Feng Xu
ACM SIGGRAPH 2025 (conference-track full paper), August 2025
Differentiating Variance for Variance-Aware Inverse Rendering
Kai Yan, Vincent Pegoraro, Marc Droske, Jiří Vorba, Shuang Zhao
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 (conference-track full paper), December 2024
Markov-Chain Monte Carlo Sampling of Visibility Boundaries for Differentiable Rendering
Peiyu Xu, Sai Bangaru, Tzu-Mao Li, Shuang Zhao
ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 (conference-track full paper), December 2024
selected teaching
Conference courses:
Physics-Based Differentiable Rendering
Shuang Zhao, Ioannis Gkioulekas, and Sai Bangaru
CVPR 2021 Tutorial
Physics-Based Differentiable Rendering: A Comprehensive Introduction
Shuang Zhao, Wenzel Jakob, and Tzu-Mao Li
SIGGRAPH 2020 Course
UC Irvine:
2023--2024
I am on sabbatical and not teaching any class.