Heeringa and McGuire receive tenure.

Following the recommendation of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the Williams College Board of Trustees has promoted both Brent Heeringa and Morgan McGuire to the position of associate professor with tenure. The promotion will take effect July 1, 2012. In total, eight professors were awarded tenure this past year.


Brent Heeringa

Heeringa is interested in approximation algorithms, computational complexity, data structures and computability. He has been published in the journal Algorithmica and has presented at numerous peer-reviewed conferences. His research is supported financially by the National Science Foundation. During his time as a graduate student he helped several other computer scientists in founding Adverplex, a company that works with pay-per-click advertising.

Heeringa first arrived at Williams in 2003 as a visiting professor during a break in his graduate studies. Since his return, he has become faculty advisor for the women’s tennis team. He received his B.A. from the University of Minnesota, Morris, and his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Morgan McGuire

McGuire’s current interests are algorithms and hardware for high-performance computing, interactive global illumination and special effects for film and video games. He uses real-time 3D graphics as a representative application domain for these computing challenges. He previously worked on related topics in image processing and computational photography.

He’s contributed as an industry consultant to products including the Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Titan Quest video game series, the E Ink display used in the Amazon Kindle, the PeakStream GPU computing architecture acquired by Google, and NVIDIA GPUs. Morgan has published papers on high-performance rendering and computational photography in SIGGRAPH, High Performance Graphics, the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering, Interactive 3D Graphics and Games, and Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering. He is a Visiting Professor at NVIDIA Research, the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques, the project manager for the G3D Innovation Engine. He previously chaired the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games and the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering. He is the author or coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles & Practice 3rd Edition, The Graphics Codex, Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology, and chapters of several GPU Gems, ShaderX and GPU Pro volumes.