Naureen Mahmood

Timeline

1. By 2015

   Research programmer at MPI

   By 2015, she has a master's degree from Texas A&M and works as a research programmer at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. She develops body-modeling software and authors SIGGRAPH papers on 3D human body shape modeling and motion capture.

2. 2015

   The SMPL body model

   At SIGGRAPH Asia in 2015, she coauthors SMPL, a learned model of human body shape and pose variation that accurately represents a wide range of body shapes in natural poses.

3. 2017

   Learning from synthetic humans

   In 2017, she coauthors the CVPR paper “Learning from Synthetic Humans,” which introduces SURREAL, a large dataset of realistic synthetic human images rendered from motion-capture sequences.

4. 2018

   Co-founding Meshcapade

   In 2018, she co-founds Meshcapade with Talha Zaman and Michael Black as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen.

5. 2019

   The AMASS motion archive

   In 2019, she coauthors AMASS, a database that unifies 15 different optical marker-based motion-capture datasets in a common framework and parameterization. Its MoSh++ method converts marker data into realistic 3D human meshes.

6. 2022

   A Max Planck startup award

   In 2022, Meshcapade wins the inaugural Max Planck Startup Award from the Stifterverband, and Mahmood is the company's CEO.

7. October 2025

   A Mark Everingham Prize

   In October 2025, the SMPL Body Model Team receives the PAMI Mark Everingham Prize at ICCV, with Mahmood among the five coauthors named with the award.

8. February 2026

   Meshcapade moves to Epic

   In February 2026, Epic Games acquires Meshcapade, which Mahmood co-founded; the team is set to join Epic's AI Research group to develop technologies for Unreal Engine and MetaHuman.