David B. Kirk
NVIDIA Fellow
David Kirk is an NVIDIA Fellow and served as NVIDIA’s chief scientist from 1997 to 2009, a role in which he led the development of graphics technology for today’s most popular consumer entertainment platforms. He also serves on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee.
Kirk was honored by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2009 with a Distinguished Alumni Award, its highest honor, for his work in the graphics-technology industry. In 2006, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his role in bringing high-performance graphics to PCs. He also received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 2002 for his role in bringing high-performance computer graphics systems to the mass market.
Prior to NVIDIA, Kirk served from 1993 to 1996 as chief scientist and head of technology for Crystal Dynamics, a video game software development company. From 1989 to 1991, he was an engineer for the Apollo Systems Division of HP.
Kirk is the inventor of more than 75 patents and patent applications relating to graphics design and has published many articles on graphics technology and parallel programming. He is also the author of the popular parallel programming textbook “Programming Massively Parallel Processors,” along with co-author Wen-mei Hwu. He holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Caltech.
