Biography
Associate Professor (Profesor Titular)
Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), Madrid
Dan Casas is Associate Professor (Profesor Titular) at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (URJC), Spain. His research interests lie at the intersection of Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning, with particular emphasis on the 3D reconstruction, modelling, and animation of virtual humans and clothing. He has authored more than 40 high-impact publications –including SIGGRAPH, CVPR, and NeurIPS–, 3 international patents, and led 7 national and European highly-competitive projects as Principal Investigator. Dan is the receiver of a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (2015), a FBBVA Leonardo Fellowship (2021), and the honorary medal for the Young Researcher Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain (2023). His research contributions have also been recognized by invitations as speaker (e.g., CVPR 2023 Workshop keynote) and organizer (e.g., ICCV 2023 Area Chair, ACM I3D 2020 General Chair) to the top venues in the field of Machine Learning, Graphics, and Computer Vision.
Dan received his M.Sc. degree (2009) from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), including a one-year research visit at Carnegie Mellon University (PA, USA). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Graphics (2014) from the University of Surrey (UK), supervised by Prof. Adrian Hilton. Dan's dissertation introduced novel methods for character animation from multi-camera capture, allowing the synthesis of video-realistic interactive 3D characters. Before joining his current position, he was a postdoc (2015–2016) at the Max Planck Institute in Saarbrücken (Germany) and a postdoc (2014–2015) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technology in Los Angeles (USA).
