Jernej Barbic is a full professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. He has published over 50 publications in computer graphics and related fields. In 2014, he was named a Sloan Research Fellow. In 2011, MIT Technology Review named him one of the Top 35 Innovators under the age of 35 in the world (TR35). He received his Ph.D. from CMU, followed by Postdoctoral Research at MIT. He was a co-founder and CTO of a successful computer animation startup company "Ziva Dynamics" (acquired by Unity Technologies). Jernej is also the author of Vega FEM, a free C/C++ software physics library for deformable object simulation.