Pat Hanrahan

Hanrahan grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and graduated with a B.S. in nuclear engineering in 1977, continued his education there, and as a graduate student taught a new computer science course in graphics in 1981. One of his first students was an art graduate student, Donna Cox, now known for her art and scientific visualizations. In the 1980s he went to work at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Laboratory and at Digital Equipment Corporation under Edwin Catmull. He returned to U.W. Madison and completed his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1985.

As a founding employee at Pixar Animation Studios, from 1986 to 1989 Hanrahan was part of the design of the RenderMan Interface Specification and the RenderMan Shading Language.

He was credited in Pixar productions including The Magic Egg (1984), Tin Toy (1988) and Toy Story (1995).

In 1989 Hanrahan joined the faculty of Princeton University. In 1995 he moved to Stanford University. In 2003 Hanrahan co-founded Tableau Software and remains its chief scientist. In February 2005 Stanford University was named the first regional visualization and analytics center for the United States Department of Homeland Security, focused on problems in information visualization and visual analytics. In 2011 Intel Research announced funding for a center for visual computing, co-led by Hanrahan and Jim Hurley of Intel.

He was the doctoral advisor of Peter Schröder and Tamara Munzner.