Location
229 Malone Hall

Michael (Misha) Kazhdan, a professor of computer science, is considered a leader in image and geometry processing, particularly in surface reconstruction and shape analysis. He is affiliated with Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Data-Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES).

His research group is interested in developing data structures and algorithms for efficiently reconstructing high-resolution surfaces from large point clouds, and developing new techniques for analyzing the geometry of 3-D shapes, providing a means for performing shape retrieval from databases of 3-D models. Kazhdan has developed about 20 software programs including PoissonRecon, which has been used by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the reconstruction of the Martian landscape data acquired by the Curiosity rover, and others such as TextureSignalProcessing and ShapeGradientDomain.

Kazhdan is a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was given the Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award in 2016. He serves on the program committee for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGGRAPH conference, is an associate editor for the ACM journal Transaction on Graphics and is papers co-chair for the Symposium on Geometry Processing. He is also recipient of the SGP Test of Time Award.

Kazhdan received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1997. He then earned a master’s degree and PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He joined the Whiting School of Engineering faculty in 2004.

Secondary Appointment: Mechanical Engineering