Rajesh Sharma
Rajesh spent 23 years at Walt Disney Animation Studios in various management and individual contributor roles including incubating and managing the Hyperion renderer team, and driving development for tools like XGen, Paint3D, hair (tonic, beast), cloth, snow (Matterhorn) and water (Splash) simulation.
Afterwards, he was the VP of Engineering at Spire Animation Studios where he led the engineering efforts to enable artists to create high quality feature animation content using new workflows and game engine technology.
Recently, Rajesh joined ETH Zurich as a PhD student where he conducts research at the intersection of rendering and machine learning at Disney Research.
Rajesh is actively involved in SIGGRAPH as a reviewer, juror and educator. He has also taught the popular online courses on Ray Tracing and Machine Learning for the past two years with over 15 hours of video instruction.
He is credited on over 15 animated feature films from Disney Animation Studios including the academy award winning films: Big Hero 6, Frozen and Zootopia and Encanto!
He is a graduate of 1985-1989 Computer Science from BIT, Mesra, has an MS in Computer Science from Indiana University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson.
Francisco Menéndez
Fran graduated in Law from the Carlos III University of Madrid and holds a Master's Degree in Film Industry Management.
As a lawyer, he practices and develops his activity in the law firm Welaw Legal Consulting, S.L., dedicated to advising production companies, investment funds, as well as banking entities specialised in audiovisuals.
His areas of expertise include intellectual property, advice on structuring aspects of audiovisual projects, international co-productions, production services, public aid, exploitation windows, as well as financial aspects of the same. He has advised dozens of audiovisual projects.
