Silvia Sellán Silvia Sellán is the recipient of the 2024 Alain Fournier Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in Computer Graphics. Dr. Sellán’s dissertation, titled, “Task-Aware 3D Geometric Synthesis,” made outstanding contributions to the field of computer graphics.
Dr. Sellán’s dissertation addresses geometry processing in the wild, developing robust algorithms and representations, and providing uncertainty assessments of reconstructed shapes. She introduces several well-illustrated and thoroughly analyzed concepts in structured chapters. Among all her contributions, here are some samples of her insights: Replacing a 3D shape as a union of simpler shapes and resolving PDEs on their overlappings instead of discretizing the interior; Recasting as a convex optimisation problem the fitting of a developable surface to captured data; Producing smooth swept volumes with dramatically less computation via a careful combination of root-finding and a numerical continuation algorithm; Modeling complex morphological operations as a modified curvature flow of the surface; and Modeling fractures as an objective function added to a generalized eigenvalue problem to build an entire basis for fracture, and projecting an impact onto this basis could fracture any object in real time. She wraps up her dissertation with the first steps in the major undertaking for building an uncertainty-aware geometry processing pipeline.
Dr. Sellán’s dissertation comprises an impressive thirteen top-tier publications, almost all as first author, including ten presented at ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia, and one at SGP, one at NeurIPS, and one at CVPR, the latter two as spotlights.
Dr. Sellán obtained a BSc in Mathematics and a BSc in Physics in 2019 at the University of Oviedo in Spain. She completed a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2024 under the supervision of Prof. Alec Jacobson. She followed as a postdoctoral associate at MIT. In July 2025, she will be starting as an assistant professor in Computer Science at Columbia University.
She received numerous awards during her studies, including an NSERC’s Vanier scholarship, an Adobe Research fellowship, and multiple awards from the University of Toronto. She completed two internships at Adobe Research.
Her academic service record is exemplary. She is the 2025 technical chair of SGP, and has been on its program committees in 2023 and 2024, as well as for SIGGRAPH and Eurographics in 2025. She has frequently taught tutorials at top conferences, and has been on the steering committee for the Summer Geometry Initiative. She has been a leader in promoting diversity at multiple research events that she organized.