Hayley Iben,
Senior Lead Software Engineer, Simulation

Contact: iben@pixar.com

Hayley Iben leads the Simulation engineering group at Pixar Animation Studios. Her group is responsible for character effects technologies including cloth, hair, flesh, and skin. She earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Duquesne University and M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. For her Ph.D. thesis, she modelled crack patterns that appear in mud, ceramic glaze, and glass through combining physically based simulation with heuristics. For her Master's project, she used numerical optimization to solve computational geometry problems. Hayley joined Pixar in 2006 where she built software tools for character articulation and animation in the Presto Animation System, with a particular focus on inverse kinematics. In 2010, she moved to simulation and joined the Research group, where she was involved in the development of the hair simulator, Taz, debuting in Disney-Pixar's "Brave" and published as "Artistic Simulation of Curly Hair" in ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics SCA 2013. This hair technology has since been used in subsequent films including Disney-Pixar's "Inside Out", "The Good Dinosaur", "Finding Dory", "Coco", and "Incredibles 2". In 2013, she became the lead of the Simulation engineering group.