Changjian Li, 2025 SMA Young Investigator Award Recipient
Dr. Changjian Li is an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where he leads the GraphViX Group (Graphics, Vision, and X). Prior to joining Edinburgh, he was a starting researcher at INRIA and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London under Prof. Niloy Mitra. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2019 under Prof. Wenping Wang.
His research spans geometric modeling and analysis, with a particular focus on sketch-based modeling of both freeform and CAD shapes. His work has been recognized with a Best Paper Honorable Mention award at SIGGRAPH 2022 and as a Best Paper Candidate at CVPR 2021. He has developed two novel systems for freeform shape modeling and two for CAD-shape modeling, alongside a concept-sketch generator that bridges early industrial design and high-fidelity 3D CAD representations. Moreover, he introduced a differentiable CSG rasterizer to enable efficient, gradient-based CSG optimization.
In shape analysis, Dr. Li has contributed state-of-the-art algorithms for 3D skeleton extraction, segmentation, point-cloud up-sampling and completion. Notably, he has solid contributions to geometric-computing applications in medical imaging—ranging from automated bone-scaffold generation to detailed human-teeth segmentation and modeling. Several of his methods have been integrated into commercial CAD platforms in collaboration with industry leaders in orthodontics.