Since 2020, I am a professor with the Informatics and CS departments in the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I defended my PhD thesis at the Computer Science Department at University of California, Los Angeles, advised by Prof. Demetri Terzopoulos from the University of California, Los Angeles. I received my M.S. from University of California, Los Angeles, and my B.S. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

My scientific accomplishments focus on real-time and scalable algorithms for creating large virtual environments, and for simulating AI agents, and crowds of agents in these environments. For these efforts, I received the following awards:

• ACM SIGGRAPH Motion in Games Best Paper Award (2017), and
• the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (2025), and
• the Best Presentation Award at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation (2025).

Additionally, I was selected as a finalist presenter of my doctoral dissertation at ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Thesis Fast Forward, and ACM SIGGRAPH Asia 2018 Doctoral Consortium. I have also worked with Wayfair, Autodesk Research, Amazon Search, and Bloomberg. My goal is to close the gap between virtual and physical reality. To that end, I am broadly interested in real-time optimization for visual applications, AR/VR/XR, multi-agent simulation, 3D content creation, and machine learning.

Opportunities

If you are an existing undergrad or MS students at NJIT in Computer Science or Informatics interested in working with us, you must first enroll to a foundational class in our research area which includes IT 360. We do not have positions for students that have not completed this class. We have opportunities for a project-based research independent study with or without academic credit. Note we also do not have any credit opportunities for NJIT Data Science or students from other NJIT colleges at this point. We do not offer any paid opportunities at this point.

If you are a New Jersey highschool student interested in working with us, we must have existing background computer graphics, such as a developing a game, visual application, shader program and so on. You are strongly encouraged to train yourself to be aproficient with at least two of the following: Python, C++, C#, Java, Lua, and Javascript.

If you are applying to be a PhD Doctoral Student at NJIT and want to work with me, you need to apply to the Information Systems PhD program. I have limited say on who gets accepted.

At this point we do not have any opportunities for external applicants , e.g. students who have finished their BS, MS, or PHD outside of NJIT and are looking for some sort of visiting or summer position or post-doctoral position.