Helmut Pottmann is a professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science at KAUST and founding director of the Visual Computing Center at KAUST. He has had faculty positions in the US and in Germany and has been a Professor of Applied geometry at TU Wien since 1992. His research interests are in Applied Geometry, Visual Computing and most recently in Geometric Computing for Architecture and Manufacturing. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and recipient of the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award, the Bezier Award of the Solid Modeling Association and the John Gregory Award for fundamental contributions to geometric modeling.