Tao Ju is a computer scientist and professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His research is in computer graphics, particularly geometric modeling, mesh processing, shape understanding, and biomedical image analysis.
Education Ju received a BA from Tsinghua University in 1999 and a BS from Tsinghua University in 2000. He earned a PhD from Rice University in 2005.
Career Ju joined Washington University in St. Louis in 2005 and became a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He served as vice dean of research for the McKelvey School of Engineering from 2016 to 2021. He has also served as Washington University's ambassador to Tsinghua University for the McDonnell International Scholars Academy.
Research Ju's research concerns computer graphics, geometric modeling, and biomedical image analysis. His work includes algorithms for surface reconstruction, repair and topological simplification of geometric models, skeleton and medial-axis computation, generalized barycentric coordinates, and geometric methods for biomedical image analysis.
In surface reconstruction, Ju co-authored the 2002 paper "Dual Contouring of Hermite Data", which described a method for contouring signed grids tagged with Hermite data. Later work addressed reconstruction from non-parallel curve networks and cross-sections, and variational reconstruction from point sets.
In model repair and topological simplification, Ju published "Robust Repair of Polygonal Models" in 2004 and co-authored work on topology repair of solid models using skeletons. He later co-authored a global optimization approach to topological simplification.
Ju has also worked on generalized barycentric coordinates. With Scott Schaefer and Joe Warren, he published "Mean Value Coordinates for Closed Triangular Meshes", which generalized mean value coordinates from two-dimensional polygons to closed triangular meshes. His later work in this area included cubic mean value coordinates.
In biomedical and biological image analysis, Ju has co-authored work on protein structure modeling from cryo-electron microscopy density maps, a digital atlas of the mouse brain transcriptome, and computational methods for plant root phenotyping from three-dimensional images. He has also co-authored interdisciplinary work applying geometric and imaging methods to computer security and archaeology.
Awards and recognition
2009 - NSF CAREER Award. 2014 - SciVis Best Paper Honorable Mention, for "A Robust Parity Test for Extracting Parallel Vectors in 3D", with Minxin Cheng, Xu Wang, and Ye Duan. 2015 - TVCG Best Associate Editor Award, shared with Gennady Andrienko and Enrico Gobbetti. 2024 - ACM Distinguished Member. 2025 - SIGGRAPH Best Paper Honorable Mention, for "Variational Surface Reconstruction Using Natural Neighbors", with Jianjun Xia.
References