Hello, world!

Welcome to my collection of academic endeavors, personal projects, and random musings. Outside of my academic interests, I'm also passionate about

social equity
the environment and sustainability
mental health awareness
swimming, running, and hiking
plants and gardening
cooking and baking
DIY and crafting
cats

I'm on a life-long journey of learning and growth, and I'm excited to see where I'll go!

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I swam competitively for 10 years and fell in love with learning.

From 2016 to 2020 I was in the Los Angeles area while attending Harvey Mudd College, through which I double majored and earned a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science and Visual Art.

Currently, I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student with a focus on Computer Graphics at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver area, under the supervision of Eugene Fiume. Within graphics, I am presently most interested in physically-based animation and geometric modeling. I'm constantly amazed by how math, science, and art can come together in order to represent the world around us in a meaningful way.

Over the past few years, I have had the pleasure of interning as a software engineer at several different companies, including the following:

Unity Technologies, which provides a real-time 3D development platform
DICE LA, an Electronic Arts game studio
HomeAway (VRBO), which offers a web interface for renting out homes

For a capstone project through Harvey Mudd College, I have also worked for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on GPU-accelerated visualization of high-order physics simulation meshes.

Please contact me at juliahread [at] gmail [dot] com for more details on these experiences. Although I am presently in the world of academia, I enjoy contributing to applied projects and hope to continue to do so in the future.