William Schroeder
Dr. Schroeder is President, CEO and co-founder of Kitware, Inc. Will's role at Kitware is to identify technology and business opportunities, and to obtain the necessary support for Kitware to meet these opportunities. Dr. Schroeder also provides technical leadership in large open source projects such as the National Library of Medicine Insight Toolkit project (www.itk.org), the NA-MIC NIH National Center for Biomedical Computing (www.na-mic.org), and the Visualization Toolkit (www.vtk.org), where he is a lead developer, member of the Architecture Review Board, and first author of the Visualization Toolkit textbook. Dr. Schroeder is also an advocate for open source software and business models, and assistant-teaches an open source course at RPI (with Dr. Luis Ibanez) as part of the Rensselaer Center for Open Source Software.
Prior to his current position, Dr. Schroeder was a computational scientist at the GE Corporate R&D Center where he developed software visualization tools for the analysis of mechanical systems such as aircraft engines, as well as medical and general computational visualization. In an earlier position at the same organization, he developed advanced tools for fully automatic mesh generation. From 1980 through 1987 he was a design engineer at GE's Gas Turbine Division where he helped design and implement advanced simulation systems based on finite element, finite difference and boundary element numerical methods.
Dr. Schroeder graduated in 1983 with a M.S. in applied mathematics, and in 1991 with a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His Ph.D. was obtained part-time over an eleven year period while he worked full time at GE. Dr. Schroeder graduated summa cum laude from the University of Maryland in 1980 as a mechanical engineer. Dr. Schroeder continues to be active in the research community presenting papers, teaching courses, and participating in panel discussions at such conferences as IEEE Visualization and Siggraph. Dr. Schroeder has also been an invited speaker at many scientific computing and open source conferences.