PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Ben Mildenhall

Ben Mildenhall's work spans neural rendering and text-to-3D generation. In 2015, he received a Hertz Fellowship as a Stanford undergraduate planning doctoral study in computer science and graphics at UC Berkeley. His NeRF paper synthesized new views of complex scenes from sparse images; Mip-NeRF reduced aliasing, and Mip-NeRF 360 handled unbounded scenes. With Ben Poole, Ajay Jain, and Jonathan Barron, he coauthored DreamFusion, which used a pretrained 2D text-to-image diffusion model for text-to-3D generation and received a 2023 ICLR Outstanding Paper Award. He co-founded World Labs with Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Christoph Lassner; as of October 2026, he and Justin Johnson are set to continue leading its team as it joins AMD.

Now at
World Labs
Works
64
Citations
28,671
h-index
37
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2015

    A Hertz Fellowship

    In 2015, he receives a Hertz Fellowship while studying at Stanford and planning doctoral work in computer science and graphics at UC Berkeley.

  2. 2020

    NeRF for novel views

    In 2020, he coauthors NeRF, which optimizes a continuous volumetric scene function from sparse input views to synthesize novel views.

  3. 2021

    Mip-NeRF reduces aliasing

    In 2021, he coauthors Mip-NeRF, whose conical-frustum rendering reduces aliasing and improves fine detail.

  4. 2022

    Mip-NeRF 360 for unbounded scenes

    In 2022, he coauthors Mip-NeRF 360, which uses a nonlinear scene parameterization, online distillation, and a distortion-based regularizer for unbounded scenes.

  5. 2023

    DreamFusion wins at ICLR

    In 2023, his DreamFusion paper with Ben Poole, Ajay Jain, and Jonathan T. Barron receives an ICLR Outstanding Paper Award. It uses a pretrained 2D text-to-image diffusion model to generate 3D models from text.

  6. 2024

    Co-founding World Labs

    In 2024, he co-founds World Labs with Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Christoph Lassner.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading World Labs toward AMD

    As of October 2026, he is a World Labs co-founder and is set to continue leading the team as it joins AMD.

Career

  1. Since 2024World LabsCo-founder
  2. 2021–2024Google
  3. 2017–2021University of California, Berkeley

Education

  1. Stanford UniversityUndergraduate student

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. NeRF2021 · Communications of the ACM · 6,773 citationsWith Jonathan T. Barron and Ravi Ramamoorthi
  2. NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis2020 · Lecture notes in computer science · 5,318 citationsWith Jonathan T. Barron and Ravi Ramamoorthi
  3. Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields2022 · IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 1,973 citationsWith Jonathan T. Barron
  4. Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields2021 · IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) · 1,964 citationsWith Jonathan T. Barron
  5. Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains2020 · 1,456 citationsWith Jonathan T. Barron and Ravi Ramamoorthi

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. Google alumni founded or led 81 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Ben Mildenhall. We trace 194 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 202 career moves between the labs.
  2. 14% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Ben Mildenhall. Our estimates of how university-to-company career transitions changed by decade, including roles added alongside an earlier job.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  4. Stanford University trained or employed 26 of the 108 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Stanford University. Stanford University trained or employed 26 of the 108 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Ben Mildenhall yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Foundation Awards Prestigious Fellowship to 12 Recipients hertzfoundation.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Ben Mildenhall bmild.github.io. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields jonbarron.info. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields jonbarron.info. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. About Us | World Labs worldlabs.ai. Checked 18 October 2026.
  8. World Labs is Joining AMD worldlabs.ai. Checked 18 October 2026.