Markus Gross (born June 14, 1963, Saarland, Germany) is a Professor of Computer science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH), head of its Computer Graphics Laboratory, and serves as Chief Scientist at The Walt Disney Studios as well as Director of DisneyResearch|Studios. His research interests include physically based modeling, computer animation, immersive displays, and video technology. He has published more than 430 scientific papers on algorithms and methods in the field of computer graphics and computer vision, and holds more than 30 patents.
Early life and career Markus Gross was born on June 14, 1963, in Neunkirchen, Saarland, a region historically influenced by both Germany and France during the first half of the 20th century. As an only child, he received significant attention from his parents, who balanced their day jobs with a passion for music, regularly performing with their own band. Consequently, Gross grew up immersed in popular and jazz music. His fascination with animated films began after watching Disney’s The Jungle Book. He quickly developed a deep affection for animation and the Disney brand, becoming an avid collector of Disney comic books, which were widely popular in Europe. The character Gyro Gearloose, known for his inventive and eccentric nature, particularly resonated with him and inspired an early interest in electronics and engineering. Encouraged by this passion, he persuaded his parents to purchase a TI-59 programmable calculator, which sparked his interest in microcoding. Around the age of 14, Gross encountered the Commodore PET computer at his local high school, prompting him to begin programming in BASIC and Pascal. Despite the limited graphical capabilities of early computers, he became fascinated by the potential to represent computational results visually in two and three dimensions. His interest deepened upon discovering pioneering animated clips created by Ed Catmull’s team at the New York Institute of Technology, which convinced him that his future lay in computer graphics. Gross received a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Saarland University in 1986. He then continued his studies at Saarland University, earning a Ph.D. in Computer Graphics and Image Analysis in 1989 under the supervision of José Luis Encarnação, a leading authority in computer graphics in Europe. From 1990 to 1994, he was a research scientist at the Computer Graphics Center of the Department of Computer Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt from where he received his habilitation in 1995.
Academic career In 1994, Gross joined the faculty at ETH Zurich, as a professor of computer science and founded the Computer Graphics Laboratory. From 2004 to 2008 he served as a director of the Institute of Computational Sciences at ETH. He was promoted to full professor in 1997. Between 2004 and 2008, Gross served as the director of the Institute of Computational Sciences at ETH Zurich. During his tenure, he led the establishment of two research centers: the Game Technology Center in 2015 and the Media Technology Center in 2019. Gross has served on papers committees of the major graphics conferences multiple times, including ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Visualization, Eurographics, Pacific Graphics, and others. In 2005 he became the first European papers chair of ACM SIGGRAPH. He was the conference co-chair of the Eurographics 2021.
In addition, he has been the co-organizer of various international symposia. He has served on the editorial advisory boards of various journals and was associate editor of IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications. During his tenure, Gross has co-authored more than 700 publications on topics including physically based modeling, immersive displays, video technology, image acquisition and generation, geometric modeling, computer animation, scientific visualization, and multimodal learning. As of June 2025, his current h-index is 117, and his i10-index is 469. He has coauthored 87 SIGGRAPH papers, ranking him among the top contributors in the field. Additionally, he has graduated more than 75 Ph.D. students. His early research focused on wavelet-based volume rendering, surface meshing, and physically based medical simulations. His team developed finite element methods (FEM) for modeling soft tissue, deformation, collision, fracture, and fluids, as well as real-time 3D soft tissue cutting algorithms. His work on fluid simulations has been widely adopted in movies and video games, with his 2003 paper "Particle-based fluid simulation for interactive applications" being one of his highest-cited publications with over 2000 citations. The Wavelet-Turbulence software, for which he received the “Tech-Oscar” from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has become the standard procedure for animated smoke and explosions effects and employed in films such as “Avatar,” “Kung Fu Panda,” “Iron Man 3”, and “Man of Steel,” “Battleship” and others. One of his major technical contributions is his work on point-based graphics, which enables the efficient computation of graphics pipeline processes using points rather than triangles, as in classical computer graphics. His papers “Surfels: Surface Elements as Rendering Primitives,” “Efficient Simplification of Point-Sampled Surfaces,” and “Surface Splatting” have collectively received over 4,100 citations. He is also the co-author of the book “Point-Based Graphics” (Morgan Kaufman, 2007). Before joining Disney Research, Gross also worked on the theoretical modeling of dyslexia. He developed a statistical model and a multimodal recording system to facilitate language acquisition for people with dyslexia.
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