Dr. Peter Yichen Chen honoured with Early Career Researcher Award at 2026 Symposium on Computer Animation
Assistant Professor Peter Yichen Chen recognized for significant contributions to the computer animation field
UBC Computer Science Assistant Professor Peter Yichen Chen has been awarded the Early Career Researcher Award at the 25TH ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA 2026), which is taking place from July 8 - 10, 2026 in Barcelona, Spain. The award recognizes researchers who have demonstrated noteworthy early-career achievements and show strong potential for continued impact in the field of computer animations.
“I’m honoured and thrilled to have been recognized for my work,” says Dr. Chen. “In my research, I study approaches to make simulations more realistic, computations more efficient and tools more accessible to all researchers. I hope that my work opens new pathways for innovation and interdisciplinary applications.”
Dr. Chen and his PhD students, Shixun Huang and Siyuan Chen, are presenting a paper at SCA 2026: Closing Trajectories: Equation-Free Cyclic Animation via Koopman Surrogates.
Dr. Chen, who joined UBC as an Assistant Professor in 2025, leads the PhsAI lab, studying AI and physics simulation and partnering with various industry collaborators such as NVIDIA, Amazon and Meta. His research takes two concurrent approaches: using classical laws of physics by leveraging partial differential equations from first principles, and using a data-driven approach by training neural networks from observations. By integrating these two approaches, he builds simulators of our three-dimensional world with wide-ranging applications.
To date, Dr. Chen has published 20 peer-reviewed papers, many of which are in top machine learning and computer graphics conferences. He has won several distinctions for his research, including mostly recently a Best Paper Award and a Best Paper Award Honourable Mention at SIGGRAPH 2025 for his work on modeling complex and delicate structures, and optimizing design solutions for shapes that are constrained by physics.
For the past several years, Dr. Chen has been organizing courses and workshops at the leading computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH. His most recent course, Graphics4Science, which was presented at SIGGRAPH 2025, explored the deep and evolving relationship between computer graphics and science. Based on its strong engagement, the material will be adapted to a more in-depth workshop called Graphics x Science: Graphics for Cross-Scale Reliable Scientific Instruments at the upcoming SIGGRAPH 2026 conference this year.
Prior to joining UBC, Dr. Chen was a researcher at the Meta Reality Labs and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned a PhD in computer science at Columbia University and a BS in applied mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles.