About Kalina

Kalina is a principal scientific visualization programmer for the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A Bittersweet Promotion

With the retirement of Professor Donna J. Cox, I have taken over as lead of the Advanced Visualization Lab. Donna built the lab up from nothing, she’s a pioneer in the fields of computer graphics and scientific visualization, she has multiple lifetime achievement awards… I have some very, very big shoes to fill. Read about Donna’s legacy here.

 

Demo Reel

I put together a demo reel showing some of the projects I have contributed to during my time at the NCSA. Check it out and leave your comments.

Working with the Greats of our time

I kicked off a new collaboration today with Andrea Ghez, the most-recent recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Not only did Dr. Ghez discover the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, she’s also a wonderfully pleasant and down-to-Earth person! Working together won’t suck (<– terrible black hole pun).

NASA SVS + AVL = BFFs

Today, Mark SubbaRao, NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio lead, and I kicked off a cross-group “journal club” between our teams. All of us got together and had a lively discussion about an academic journal article on science miscommunication that I picked out, and then we did a show-and tell to talk about what each of our groups is working on. It’s nice to be able to geek out about this stuff together, we’re going to do this every month!

And the Academy Award goes to…

This year, I am one of 7 jurors for the prestigious SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. This is a qualifying festival for the Academy Awards! I’m starting to watch entries today, it’s going to be a busy (and fun and amazing) week.