As one of SFU's most outstanding graduate students from the Faculty of Applied Sciences, Dr. Zhiqin Chen is recognized with the Governor General’s Gold Convocation Medal. On behalf of SFU, we congratulate Dr. Chen on his outstanding achievements.

In his doctoral thesis, Neural Mesh Reconstruction, Zhiqin Chen proposed several methods for 3D reconstruction and generation. He did this by combining machine learning and classic computer graphics algorithms. His work introduced neural implicit representation, which is now one of the dominant representations in 3D generation applications.

In 2021, Chen was one of only two Canadian Google PhD Scholarship recipients. He interned with Adobe, Google, and NVIDIA during his studies and created four major pieces of work that tackle issues in 3D capture, reconstruction, and generation applications.   

Chen received accolades from the top computer sciences conferences in computer graphics and computer vision in 2020 and 2023. These include the Best Student Paper Award at Computer Vision Foundation (CVPR) in 2020 (out of 1,467 accepted papers from the 6, 424 submitted papers) and the CVPR Best Paper Candidate in 2023 (top 12 out of 2,259 accepted papers and more than 9,100 submitted papers). Additionally, Chen’s PhD thesis received the Alain Fournier Dissertation Award and Eurographics PhD Thesis Award in 2024.

Dr. Hao Zhang, Chen’s supervisor confirms that Chen is deserving of this recognition. “Zhiqin is an amazing student, truly remarkable really. Ingenious ideas just seem to ‘flow’ out of his head naturally; I only had to place a hint here, plant a seed there. He always comes back with the ideas, results, as well as insightful analysis! I do not know what more I could ask for.” says Zhang.

Chen expresses deep gratitude and enthusiasm upon receiving the award. "I am truly honored to be recognized for my past research endeavors through this medal. I want to extend my gratitude to my amazing colleagues and collaborators at SFU. We often discuss state-of-the-art research together and brainstorm new ideas, which have been instrumental in shaping my PhD journey. A special shoutout to my supervisor, whose guidance has not only refined my research instincts but also set a high bar for excellence in my research work." says Chen.

Chen is now a Research Scientist with Adobe Research where he continues his pursuit on deep-learning-powered 3D algorithms.