Pat Hanrahan

Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer scientist whose work sits at the foundation of two industries: cinematic computer graphics and modern data visualisation. A professor at Stanford University since 1995, he shared the 2019 ACM A.M. Turing Award — computing's highest honour — with Ed Catmull for 'fundamental contributions to 3-D computer graphics, and the revolutionary impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI) in filmmaking and other applications.'

Hanrahan earned a bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering, followed by a master's and PhD in biophysics, all from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He began his career in computer graphics research at the New York Institute of Technology and Digital Equipment Corporation before joining Pixar Animation Studios as a founding employee in 1986, where he helped develop the RenderMan rendering system and shading language that became the industry standard for photorealistic computer-generated imagery in film.

After a faculty position at Princeton, Hanrahan moved to Stanford in 1995, where his Computer Graphics Laboratory produced influential work on GPU programming, scientific visualisation and, crucially, visual analytics — research into how people perceive and interact with graphical representations of data. That research, alongside PhD student Chris Stolte and entrepreneur Christian Chabot, became the technical basis for Tableau Software, which Hanrahan co-founded in 2003 and where he has remained chief scientist.

Tableau commercialised Hanrahan's academic work on 'VizQL', a visual query language that let users construct database queries by dragging and dropping fields onto a canvas, instantly generating charts and dashboards. The company went public in 2013 and was acquired by Salesforce in 2019 for roughly $15.7 billion, making Hanrahan's dual legacy — in film rendering and in business intelligence — one of the more unusual and consequential in modern computing.

Hanrahan holds three Academy Awards for his contributions to rendering technology used throughout the film industry, is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the ACM. He continues to lead research and teaching at Stanford, mentoring the next generation of graphics and visualisation researchers.