PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Todd Zickler

Todd Zickler is a Harvard computer vision researcher whose work uses images and light to model visual appearance. He earned an honours BEng in electrical engineering at McGill in 1996 and a PhD in electrical engineering at Yale under Peter Belhumeur in 2004; he moved to Harvard in July 2004. He received a US NSF career award in 2006 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2008. His work includes Reflectance Sharing, an image-based rendering paper based on sparse images; A Reflectance Display, which reacts to changes in illumination and viewpoint; and Eclipse, which uses unintended shadows to recover materials and illumination. As of October 2026, he is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Harvard, researches light and materials, and teaches computer vision.

Works
191
Citations
6,390
h-index
43

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 1996–2004

    McGill and Yale engineering

    He earns an honours BEng in electrical engineering at McGill in 1996 and a PhD in electrical engineering at Yale under Peter Belhumeur in 2004. In July 2004, he moves to Harvard's Division of Engineering and Applied Science.

  2. 2005

    Reflectance Sharing

    In 2005, he coauthors Reflectance Sharing, a paper on image-based rendering from a sparse set of images.

  3. 2006

    An NSF career award

    He receives a US NSF career award for Foundations for Ubiquitous Image-based Appearance Capture in 2006.

  4. 2008

    A Sloan Research Fellowship

    In 2008, he is named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

  5. May 2011–July 2011

    Tenure at Harvard SEAS

    In May 2011, Harvard grants him tenure at SEAS, effective in July 2011.

  6. 2014

    A Reflectance Display

    With Daniel Glasner and Anat Levin, he coauthors A Reflectance Display for ACM SIGGRAPH in 2014. The display passively reacts to illumination and viewpoint changes without illumination-recording sensors or on-the-fly rendering.

  7. 2024

    Eclipse uses shadows

    In 2024, he coauthors Eclipse at CVPR, a method that uses unintended shadows in images to recover precise materials and illumination.

  8. As of October 2026

    Harvard professorship and teaching

    As of October 2026, he is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Harvard SEAS. His research models interactions between light and materials and develops systems to extract useful information from measurements of light; in fall 2026, he teaches Computer Vision (COMPSCI 3480).

Career

  1. NowHarvard UniversityWilliam and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Education

  1. 2004Yale UniversityPhD in electrical engineering
  2. 1996McGill UniversityBEng in electrical engineering

From the biography.

Checked career sources: cs.yale.edu, zickler.seas.harvard.edu.

Colleagues

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

Sources and credits

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  1. Todd Zickler's Homepage Has Moved cs.yale.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  2. PI Bio – Zickler Lab zickler.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  3. Publications – Zickler Lab zickler.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  4. SIGGRAPH 2008 Class: Principles of Appearance Acquisition and Representation gfx.cs.princeton.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  5. Todd Zickler named a 2008 Alfred P. Sloan research fellow seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  6. Kit Parker and Todd Zickler granted tenure seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  7. A Reflectance Display vision.seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  8. Eclipse: Disambiguating Illumination and Materials using Unintended Shadows arxiv.org. Checked 26 October 2026.
  9. Todd Zickler | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences seas.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.
  10. COMPSCI 3480 - my.harvard my.harvard.edu. Checked 26 October 2026.