Katie Moore receives a NASA VSGC STEM Research Fellowship

Doctoral student Katie Moore received a Virginia Space Grant Consortium 2012-13 Graduate STEM Research Fellowship.

The purpose of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium Graduate STEM Research Fellowship program is to encourage talented individuals to pursue careers in the aerospace industry that support NASA's mission.  The goals are to promote graduate aerospace-related research activity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), while recognizing high academic achievement and promise.  The Graduate Research Fellowships are $5,000 awards for students enrolled at a Virginia Space Grant university (College of William & Mary, Hampton University, Old Dominion University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech) pursuing any field of graduate student (Masters or Doctoral level) with aerospace relevance.

Katie works in the area computer graphics, with a specific focus on appearance modeling: digitizing the appearance of physical objects.  These digital representation can then be used to accurately visualize the digital object from any viewpoint and under any lighting conditions.  Her research has applications in fields as diverse as anthropology and medicine.

The work supported by the VSGC Fellowship investigates the impact of the translucency of materials (such as marble, human skin, etc..) on the accuracy at which detailed surface geometry can be acquired.  Prior work assumed opaque materials and has ignored this common light transport phenomena resulting in a loss of apparent surface detail.  The goal of the supported research would be to simultaneously extract appearance parameters of the translucent material, as well as infer accurate and sharp surface detail.

Photo by: Saskia Mordijck