Alumnus Hanspeter Pfister, Chief Architect of VolumePro, MERL

I recently attended the holiday party of Real Time Visualization, a one-year-old company with approximately 40 employees, which specializes in the development of hardware for scientific visualization. The extraordinary thing is that this company was founded on the Ph.D. research I completed in 1996 at Stony Brook. It is not very often that a new Ph.D. graduate gets the opportunity to turn a thesis into a successful product, even less often that a new company is founded to engineer and sell this product. In my case, it was certainly a matter of fortunate timing, but also a matter of encouragement, persistence, and long-term vision by my advisor, Arie Kaufman, Professor and Chair of the department.

In 1991 I came from Switzerland to Stony Brook’s Department of Computer Science.What struck me immediately was the warm, familiar atmosphere between faculty and graduate students. In 1992, Professor Kaufman and I started working on Cube-3, a hardware architecture for real-time volume visualization. By the end of my Ph.D. thesis in 1996, we finished the architecture of Cube-4.

Mitsubishi Electric licensed the Cube-4 technology, and in 1996 I joined MERL, a Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a research scientist. It took two more years to make Cube-4 into a product, called VolumePro, and it took another year to found Real Time Visualization to design, market, and sell VolumePro. Overall, it took 15 years from the start of the Cube research at Stony Brook to the first sale of VolumePro, and it was both an exciting and challenging time. It takes visionaries such as Arie Kaufman and a nurturing and encouraging academic environment to make such dreams come true. The highest praise I can offer of Stony Brook is that it fosters such an environment.