Carol O’Sullivan receives the EUROGRAPHICS Distinguished Career Award 2026. Carol is the Professor of Visual Computing at Trinity College Dublin and has been a leader in computer graphics research at the international level for over twenty years. She is a EUROGRAPHICS Fellow and has played a central role in shaping the direction of perception-driven computer graphics research worldwide.
Carol has made seminal contributions to the integration of human perception into computer graphics rendering and evaluation. She set the standard for rigorous human-subject experimentation in graphics, producing profound insights that directly inform the development of improved animation, simulation, and rendering techniques. Her work includes the first use of semantic information to evaluate the fidelity of crowd simulations, pioneering studies on the distinctiveness and attractiveness of full-body human motion, foundational research on animation perception, and influential contributions to animation, such as dual quaternion skinning.
Carol’s research has had lasting impact both in academia and industry. She has collaborated extensively with leading companies including Disney, Sony, and IBM, and outputs of her research have been widely incorporated in production pipelines at Pixar, Disney Imagineering, or ILM.
In addition to her distinguished research, Carol has an extraordinary record of service and leadership within the international computer graphics community. She has contributed significantly to many major conferences and symposia. She was General Chair of EUROGRAPHICS 2005, Tutorials Chair for EUROGRAPHICS 2021, Papers Chair for ACM SIGGRAPH 2021, to name a few. She has served as Associate Editor for Computer Graphics Forum, Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, and most recently as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics.
Carol has also been an exceptional mentor and educator. Many of her former students and postdocs now hold faculty positions or senior permanent research roles at leading institutions and laboratories worldwide. EUROGRAPHICS is extremely pleased to honor Carol O’Sullivan with the 2026 Distinguished Career Award in recognition of her seminal contributions to perception-driven computer animation and graphics, and her sustained leadership in the field.