Ming C. Lin

Ming Chieh Lin is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist, the Barry Mersky and Capital One Endowed Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also the former chair of the Department of Computer Science; before moving to Maryland in 2018 she was the John R. and Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Born in Taiwan, she moved with her family to the United States in 1980 and earned her BS, MS and PhD in computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, completing the doctorate in 1993. She is known for her work on collision detection, in particular the Lin-Canny algorithm for maintaining the closest pair of features of two moving objects, and for using axis-aligned bounding boxes and bounding box hierarchies to speed collision tests; her software libraries are widely used in computer aided design and computer games. She was named an ACM Fellow in 2011 and an IEEE Fellow in 2012, and was editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 2011 to 2014.