Biography | Publications
Dr. Schroeder is President 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 provides technical leadership in projects such as NLM's Insight Toolkit project (itk.org), NSF-funded projects for higher-order finite element visualization and visual databases, DOE grid computing, and various projects for medical image analysis.

Kitware was founded in 1998 to support the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) software that was initially created as a part of a visualization textbook authored by Will (along with Ken Martin and Bill Lorensen) and published by Prentice-Hall. Dr. Schroeder continues to contribute technically to the VTK software and also contributes to other open-source and proprietary software systems such as ITK, the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit.

Prior to his current position, Dr. Schroeder was computational scientist as the GE Corporate R&D Center where he developed software tools for the analysis of mechanical systems, including medical and 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 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 on panel discussions at such conferences as Siggraph, IEEE Visualization, and Supercomputing.  Dr. Schroeder has also been an invited speaker at conferences such as Pacific Graphics, the CINECA (Italy) Supercomputing Series, Visualization Development Environments 2000, and ATT Visualization Days.

Selected Publications

William J. Schroeder, François Bertel, Mathieu Malaterre, David Thompson, Philippe P. Pébay, Robert O'Bara and Saurabh Tendulkar, Methods and Framework for Visualizing Higher-Order Finite Elements, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 12(4):446-460, July/August 2006.

Steve Pieper, Bill Lorensen, Will Schroeder, Ron Kikinis. The NA-MIC Kit: ITK, VTK, Pipelines, Grids and 3D Slicer as An Open Platform for the Medical Image Computing Community. In Proc. of ISBI Nano To Macro 2006 Conference, April 2006.

William J. Schroeder, François Bertel, Mathieu Malaterre, David Thompson, Philippe P. Pébay, Robert O'Bara and Saurabh Tendulkar, Framework for Visualizing Higher-Order Basis Functions, In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization 2005, Minneapolis, MN, October 23-28, 2005, pages 43--50. (draft)

Will Schroeder and Mark Shephard. Computational Visualization. In Encyclopedia of Computational Mechanics, E. Stein, R. De Borst, J.R. Thomas, editors. J. Wiley, 2004.

Will Schroeder and Ken Martin. Overview of Visualization. . In The Visualization Handbook, C. D. Hansen and C. R. Johnson, editors. Elsevier, 2004.

Will Schroeder and Ken Martin. The Visualization Toolkit. . In The Visualization Handbook, C. D. Hansen and C. R. Johnson, editors. Elsevier, 2004.

Will Schroeder, Berk Geveci, Mathieu Malaterre. Compatible Triangulations of Spatial Decompositions.. In Proc. of IEEE Visualization 2004, October 2004.

Luis Ibanez, Will Schroeder, Lydia Ng, Josh Cates. The ITK Software Guide. ISBN 1-930934-10-6, Kitware, Inc. 2003.

Will Schroeder, Luis Ibanez, Ken Martin. Software Process: The Key to Developing Robust, Reusable and Maintainable Open-Source Software.. In Proc. of ISBI Nano To Macro 2004 Conference, April 2004.

Brad King and Will Schroeder. Automated Wrapping of Complex C++ Code.. C/C++ Users Journal, January 2003.

T.S. Yoo, M. J. Ackerman, W. E. Lorensen, W. Schroeder, V. Chalana, S. Aylward, D. Metaxes, R. Whitaker. Engineering and Algorithm Design for an Image Processing API: A Technical Report on ITK - The Insight Toolkit. In Proc. of Medicine Meets Virtual Reality, J. Westwood, ed., IOS Press Amsterdam pp 586-592, 2002.

W. J. Schroeder, L. S. Avila, K. M. Martin, W. Hoffman, C. Charles Law, The Visualization Toolkit User's Guide, ISBN 1-930934-05-X, Kitware, Inc. 2001.

H. Pfister, W.E. Lorensen, C. Bajaj, Kindlmann, W.J. Schroeder, L.S. Avila, K.M. Martin, Transfer Function Bake-Off, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 21(3), (May/June 2001).

W.J. Schroeder, L.S. Avila, W. Hoffman, Visualizing with VTK: A Tutorial, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications, 20(5), (Sept/Oct 2000).

C. Charles Law, K. M. Martin, W. J. Schroeder, J. E. Temkin, A Multi-Threaded Streaming Pipeline Architecture for Large Structured Data Sets, Proc. of Visualization '99, (Oct. 1999).

Yi-Jen Chiang, C. T. Silva, W. J. Schroeder, Interactive Out-of-Core Isosurface Extraction, Proc. of Visualization '98, pp 167-174, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, October 1998.

C.Charles Law, L. S. Avila, W. J. Schroeder. Application of Path Planning and Visualization for Industrial Design and Maintainability Analysis, Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS) Proceedings, 1998.

W. J. Schroeder, Ken Martin, and Bill Lorensen, The Visualization Toolkit: An Object Orient Approach to Computer Graphics, Second Edition, Prentice Hall, (1997).

W. J. Schroeder, A Topology Modifying Progressive Decimation Algorithm, Proc. of Visualization '97, pp 205-212, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (October 1997).

W. J. Schroeder and L. Sobierajski Avila, Interactive Visualization of Aircraft and Power Generation Engines, Proc. of Visualization '97, pp 483-486, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (October 1997).

W. J. Schroeder and T. Citriniti, Decimating Polygonal Meshes, Dr. Dobb's Journal, pp 109-112, Miller Freeman, July 1997.

W. J. Schroeder, K. Martin, and W. Lorensen, The Design and Implementation of an Object-Oriented Toolkit for 3D Graphics and Visualization, Proc. IEEE Visualization '96, (November 1996).

W. J. Schroeder and W.E. Lorensen, 3-D Surface Contours,, Dr. Dobb's Journal, pp 26-32, Miller Freeman, July 1996.

W. J. Schroeder, Visualizing Scientific Data,, C/C++ Users Journal, pp 33-37, Miller Freeman, 14(6), June 1996.

M.S. Shephard and W. J. Schroeder, Analysis Data for Visualization , R.S. Gallagher, editor, Computer Visualization Graphics Techniques for Scientific and Engineering AnalysisCRC Press, 1995.

W. J. Schroeder, W. E. Lorensen, and S. Linthicum, Implicit Modeling of Swept Surfaces and Volumes, Proc. of Visualization '94, pp 40-55, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA. (October 1994).

H. Cline, W. E. Lorensen, and W. J. Schroeder, 3D Phase Contrast MRI of Cerebral Blood Flow and Surface Anatomy, Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography, 17(2):173-177, (March/April 1993).

W. J. Schroeder, W. E. Lorensen, G. Montanaro, and C. Volpe, Visage: An Object-Oriented Scientific Visualization System, Proc. of Visualization '92, pp 126-132, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (October 1992).

W. J. Schroeder, J. Zarge, and W. E. Lorensen, Decimation of Triangle Meshes, Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '92). Vol. 26. No. 2, pp 65-70, (August 1992),

W. J. Schroeder, Chris Volpe, and Bill Lorensen, The Stream Polygon: A technique for 3D Vector Field Visualization, Proc. IEEE Visualization '91, pp 126-132, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (October 1991).

W. J. Schroeder and M.S. Shephard, On Rigorous Conditions for Automatically Generating Finite Element Meshes, In J. Turner, J. Pegna, and M. Wozny, editors, Product Modeling for Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing, pp 267-281, North-Holland, 1991.

W. J. Schroeder, Geometric Triangulations: With Application to Fully Automatic 3D Mesh Generation, Ph.D. Thesis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., (December 1991).

W. J. Schroeder and M. S. Shephard, A Combined Octree/Delaunay Method for Fully Automatic 3D Mesh Generation, International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 29(1):37-55, January, 1990.

C. M. Graichen, A. F. Hathaway, P. M. Finnigan, A. Kela, and W. J. Schroeder, A 3-D Fully Automated Geometry-Based Finite Element Meshing System, ASME 89-WA/CIE-4, 1989.

M. S. Shephard, K. R. Grice, A. Lo, and W. J. Schroeder, Trends in Automatic Three-Dimensional Mesh Generation, Computers and Structures, 30(1), 1988.