Dr. Whitaker received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1986. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1993. From 1994-1996 he worked at the European Computer-Industry Research Centre in Munich Germany as a research scientist in the User Interaction and Visualization Group. From 1996-2000 he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Tennessee. Since then he has been at the University of Utah where he is a Professor in the School of Computing and a faculty member of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. He teaches image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition.
Dr. Whitaker runs the Image Processing Laboratory. He conducts research in image processing, computer vision, pattern recognition, and visualization. His approach to problems in these domains is usually based upon his background in differential geometry, differential equations, and signal processing.