Frank Fan

I'm a PhD student at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Prof. Gladimir Baranoski. I am also affiliated with the Natural Phenomena Simulation Group.

Previously, I obtained both my Master's of Mathematics and my Bachelor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Feel free to read my Master's thesis!

Email: yuheng DOT fan AT uwaterloo DOT ca
CV / Resume / Github / LinkedIn

Education

PhD, Computer Science
University of Waterloo, 2026 – Present
Master of Mathematics, Computer Science
University of Waterloo, 2024 – 2026
Bachelor of Computer Science, Honours, Co-op
University of Waterloo, 2019 – 2024

Research

My main research interests lie in computer graphics, light transport, and material appearance modelling.

Publications

A Phasor-based Camera-Space Construction for Making Radiometric Accumulation Assumptions Explicit

Yuxiang Sun, Gladimir V.G. Baranoski, Frank Fan, Scott Steinfield

Proceedings of the 2026 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering - EGSR 2026, Eds. I. Gkioulekas and A. Jarabo, Bordeaux, France, July 1 - 3, 2026, pp 1-12.

Technical Reports

A Study on Rendering Techniques to Visually Represent Sparkles

Frank Fan, Gladimir V.G. Baranoski

Technical Report CS-2024-02, D.R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, January 2024.

Experience

A short summary — see my resume for full details.

	Teaching Assistant, University of Waterloo Sep 2024 – Present TA for six course offerings: CS 488 Computer Graphics (three terms, one as Lead TA) CS 398 Introduction to Graphics Programming CS 370 Numerical Computation CS 245 Logic and Computation
	Software Developer (Co-op), Rocscience Jan 2023 – Apr 2023 Built the 3D Barrier Design and Analysis feature of RocFall3, a commercial rockfall simulator: C# algorithms for rock impact height, angle, velocity, and energy, a spatial index for querying impacts on meshes of ~1M triangles, and 3D energy heatmaps.
	Software Developer (Co-op), Tactic Studios May 2022 – Aug 2022 Built a CI pipeline on the Perforce API to sync branches, trigger remote builds, and automate game asset baking, saving a team of 20 developers ~2 hours of manual work per week.
	Software Developer (Co-op), Rocscience Sep 2021 – Dec 2021 Replaced a uniform grid with an octree in the C++ spatial partitioning for dense meshes of ~1M triangles, speeding up rock-to-mesh collision detection in rockfall simulation by ~1.25×.
	Software Developer (Co-op), PSI Technologies Jan 2021 – Apr 2021 Built a real-time 3D cross-section tool in C# that clips a mesh along any plane to expose its interior, for PSIPave3D, a pavement design application.

Projects

Some CS projects from my undergrad.

CS 383 - Computational Digital Art Studio

Digital art pieces for the course.

CS 489 - Stochastic Techniques for Image Synthesis and Biomedical Applications

Colloidal Particle Collision Detection Simulation