Dr. Lisa Sobierajski Avila is Kitware’s Chief Executive Officer. Prior to serving as CEO, Dr. Avila was Vice President of Commercial Operations and a lead technical developer at Kitware. Dr. Avila oversaw Kitware’s commercial offerings including support and custom development contracts, training courses, and books. She was also responsible for Kitware’s corporate communications and public relations efforts, and she coordinated the content for the corporate web site as well as the various community sites supporting open source projects such as the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), the Insight Toolkit (ITK), CMake and ParaView.
As a technical developer, Dr. Avila is the main architect of VTK’s volume visualization functionality, with more than fifteen years of contributions to the toolkit. She has contributed to volume rendering efforts in many scientific and medical fields ranging from seismic data exploration to radiation treatment planning. Dr. Avila is on the Program Committee for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) VisWeek and International Symposium on Computer Vision (ISCV), and she has served on the editorial board for the IEEE publication Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and on the Visualization & Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC) Executive Committee.
Dr. Avila received her B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1989, 1990, and 1994, respectively. Her focus was on global illumination models for volume rendering. Prior to joining Kitware, Dr. Avila completed a post-doctoral position at Stony Brook and then joined the General Electric (GE) Corporate Research and Development center in 1994. At GE, she continued her work in the area of volume rendering, applying these methods to both medical and industrial data. Dr. Avila began working in the area of haptics, and she developed algorithms for visualizing, modifying and feeling volumetric data. Working with GE Aircraft Engines, she led the development of a state-of-the-art application for exploration and analysis of large geometric databases.