Barbara Meier Has Been Promoted To Distinguished Senior Lecturer
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on May 22, 2023
Brown CS is happy to announce that faculty member Barbara Meier has been promoted to the rank of Distinguished Senior Lecturer (pending the approval of Brown's Corporation), effective as of July 1, 2023.
Barb came to Brown in 2003 after working for more than a decade as a visual effects artist for feature films and music videos. At the start of her career at studios such as Pacific Data Images (now PDI DreamWorks), Cinesite Hollywood, and Hammerhead, the use of computer graphic production in Hollywood was still in its infancy. She was promoted to the rank of Senior Lecturer in 2012.
Barb’s early work included developing methods and tools to allow users to quickly experiment with color palettes in the context of composing imagery as well as artistic rendering, sometimes called non-photorealistic rendering. The latter became a primary focus of her research, particularly as an interactive method to draw textures and a rendering process for 2d and 3d animation: Painterly Rendering for Animation.
Currently, Barb devotes most of her time to teaching, which includes CSCI 1250 Introduction to Animation, CSCI 1280 Intermediate Animation, CSCI 1950-T Advanced Animation Production, and independent studies on a broad range of animated-related topics. Her pedagogical innovations were the subject of her recent SIGGRAPH paper (“A Focused Animation Curriculum Model”), which details a focused animation program that doesn’t require the infrastructure of an animation major, multiple instructors, or many courses. Students engage in group critiques that mimic industry “dailies”, and the emphasis is on problem-solving: after only two courses, they’re well prepared for technical director positions.
Barb is a recipient of the Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Physical Sciences, which recognizes Brown faculty members for sustained and continued excellence in teaching. A recent cover story for Conduit, the Brown CS annual magazine, tells the story of Meier and her students creating Toymaker, a seven-minute animated short that went on to win multiple awards at film festivals worldwide.
For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.
