Ryusuke Sugimoto is the recipient of the 2025 Alain Fournier Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics. Dr. Sugimoto’s dissertation, titled, Toward General-Purpose Monte Carlo PDE Solvers for Graphics Applications, makes outstanding contributions to the field of Computer Graphics.
In his doctoral dissertation, Dr. Sugimoto has approached numerical methods for physics-based simulation from an entirely novel angle: Monte Carlo (MC) methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). He first tackled computational fluid problems by solving their underlying PDEs — the Navier-Stokes equations — by developing a stochastic formulation enabling MC evaluation. He introduced the first numerically validated MC method for fluid simulation based on a vorticity formulation, and subsequently extended this framework to velocity-based formulations. Dr. Sugimoto then developed methods for PDEs with general boundary conditions via the walk-on-boundary approach, bridging the mathematical and algorithmic gap between simulation and MC rendering. Finally, he designed MC solvers for PDEs defined on 3D surfaces and curves, as well as for additional kinds of PDEs. His solutions go beyond computer graphics, and his contributions should have a long-lasting impact on numerical computing in general.
Dr. Sugimoto has published five SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia papers as first author, two as journal papers. His paper in the Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) won the Best Paper Award.
He completed a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics with First Class Honours at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Professors Toshiya Hachisuka and Christopher Batty. He is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria (ISTA) with Professor Chris Wojtan. During his studies, he completed internships at Adobe, Side Effects, and Dayta AI.
He has been a reviewer in the top journals and conferences. He served as the 2026 poster chair at SCA and is a member of the program committee of EGSR 2026.
