About

About Me

I am currently a research scientist at NVIDIA specializing in physics-based simulation and physical AI. I got my PhD in Graphics from the University of Utah. My recent research concentrates on creating parallel solutions for implicit time integration, aiming to deliver robust and efficient strategies for handling elasticity, collisions, and the dynamics of rigid bodies. Additionally, I am investigating the use of deep learning methods to speed up the convergence of physics solvers. A significant portion of my research also includes developing high-resolution deformation capture systems. Those systems are designed to collect real-world data on non-rigid objects, facilitating the study of inverse physics problems. In summary, my work serves the goal of building infrastructure for Physical AI.

I am a member of the team that developed the Warp differentiable programming language and the Newton solver. Newton is a next-generation world simulator for physical AI that NVIDIA is actively developing. I am the creator and one of the principal developers of one of Newton’s core solvers: the VBD (Vertex Block Descent) solver. The VBD solver represents one of my principal contributions during my doctoral studies. It is a robust and parallel physics solver optimized for GPU architectures, capable of simulating coupled multiphysics systems including robots, soft bodies, cloth, cables, and rigid bodies. VBD achieves unprecedented precision and computational efficiency, establishing it as an ideal algorithm for constructing world simulators.

Explanation/pronunciation of My Name

Please don’t be confused by my first name, “He.” Although it looks like a pronoun, it is pronounced as “hə” (similar to “her” without the “r”), which means “prominent” in Chinese. However, I would greatly appreciate it if you could call me by my preferred name, Anka.

Education

PhD of Computing | University of Utah | 2019 - 2024

Advisor: Prof. Cem Yuksel
Focus: Computer Graphics, Physics-Based Animation
Award: ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) 2025 Best Doctoral Dissertation Award

Master of Computational Mathematics | Dalian University of Technology | 2016 - 2019