Eurographics is very pleased to award the Eurographics Medal 2026 to George Drettakis for his outstanding research contributions, for his role in shaping computer graphics in Europe, and for his impact and leadership in the field at large.
George Drettakis is a Senior Researcher at INRIA in France. George graduated from the Dept. of Computer Science in Crete, Greece, and obtained an M.Sc.and a Ph.D., (1994) at the Dept. of C.S. (Dynamic Graphics Project) at the University of Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of Eugene Fiume. He obtained a permanent INRIA researcher position in the iMAGIS group in Grenoble in 1995, and the degree of “Habilitation” at the University of Grenoble (1999). In 2000 he founded the REVES research group at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, which he headed from 2002 until 2015. Since 2016 he heads the follow-up group GRAPHDECO. He became a INRIA Senior Researcher in 2003.
George has been recognized for his fundamental research contributions to rendering, including visibility and shadows, perceptually-informed rendering, image-based rendering, and 3D Gaussian splatting.
During his career George has consistently taken on key leadership roles in the computer graphics community, including technical papers chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2010, Associate Editor for ACM TOG, Associate Editor and Co-Editor in Chief of IEEE TVCG, and chairing the ACM SIGGRAPH Papers Advisory Group. He has had a key role in shaping computer graphics in Europe, as chair of the Steering Committee for the Eurographics Working Group on Rendering, co-chairing the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering (1998), and as papers co-chair of the Eurographics Conference (2002 and 2008). George has mentored more than twenty PhD students and as many postdoc fellows, many of whom have gone on to have significant impact of their own in academia and industry.
George is a recipient of the Eurographics Distinguished Career Award (2024) and of the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award (2025).
Please join us in congratulating George for an outstanding career in computer graphics and on being awarded the Eurographics Medal 2026.