Kurt Fleischer,
Senior Scientist

Contact: kurt@pixar.com

Kurt grew up in lovely Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just down the road from Rob Cook. After cutting his teeth on automotive repair, macrame, and fireworks, he headed for academia where he worked with Andy van Dam at Brown University (Sc.B), and later received an M.S. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Caltech.

He worked on some influential CG cloth in 1987, nearly receiving a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy, which was bestowed on his richly deserving coauthors Platt and Terzopoulos. He derives consolation from having received recognition as a "Tools Superhero" for his work on the Pixar animation system used to create Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, etc.

A member of Pixar since 1995, Kurt alternated between building film-making software and working directly on the films as a TD (most recently with stints on Cars and WALL-E), before becoming a member of the research team.