Jing Ren receives the EUROGRAPHICS Young Researcher Award 2026. Jing obtained her PhD from KAUST, advised by Peter Wonka and Maks Ovsjanikov and was a postdoc at ETH Zürich. She is now an assistant professor at Université de Montréal.
Jing has made significant contributions to shape analysis, surface modelling, and computational fabrication. Her research works on shape matching, textile shape modeling through smocking and computational kirigami deepen our understanding of discrete geometry and open new applications of creative 3D design and fabrication.
A core insight in Jing’s work is capturing geometric phenomena through discrete-continuous optimization formulations that reconcile structure with flexibility. In shape matching, she explores spectral functional map representations and enriches them with orientation-preserving operators, multiresolution schemes and robust descriptors, enabling continuous, near-bijective correspondences even under high-resolution detail and non-isometric deformations. In digital fabrication, she translates combinatorial stitching or cutting patterns into geometric embeddings, coupling 2D graph-based constructions with continuous geometric energies to predict and control induced curvature and emergent 3D form. Jing’s methods are characterized by carefully crafted objective functions, spectral and discrete differential geometry insights and computational tractability that make previously elusive geometric behavior algorithmically accessible.
The work of Jing Ren is published in the top-tier conferences and journals of computer graphics and has been widely cited. Her papers have received several honors and awards, e.g., at the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP), the International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) and SIGGRAPH. Jing’s innovative and theoretically grounded contributions to geometry processing significantly advance applications in computational fabrication and also impact the computer vision and machine perception fields.
EUROGRAPHICS is extremely pleased to recognize Jing Ren with the 2026 Young Researcher Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to Computer Graphics in the area of geometry processing, shape analysis, and computational fabrication.