Michael F. Cohen is an American computer scientist and researcher in computer graphics. He was a senior research scientist at Microsoft Research for 21 years until he joined Facebook Research in 2015. In 1998, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH CG Achievement Award for his work in developing radiosity methods for realistic image synthesis. He was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2007 for his "contributions to computer graphics and computer vision." In 2019, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics for “his groundbreaking work in numerous areas of research—radiosity, motion simulation & editing, light field rendering, matting & compositing, and computational photography”. Education Cohen attended Beloit College for his undergraduate degree, graduating with a BA in 1976 in art and Rutgers University with a BS in civil engineering in 1983. He received his master's degree in computer graphics from Cornell University in 1985. He received his PhD in computer science in 1992 from the University of Utah. Scientific career At Cornell University's Program of Computer Graphics, Cohen served as an assistant professor of architecture from 1985–1989. His first major research contributions were in the area of photorealistic rendering, in particular, in the study of radiosity: the use of finite elements to solve the rendering equation for environments with diffusely reflecting surfaces. His most significant results included the hemicube (1985), for computing form factors in the presence of occlusion; an experimental evaluation framework (1986), one of the first studies to quantitatively compare real and synthetic imagery; extending radiosity to non-diffuse environments (1986); integrating ray tracing with radiosity (1987); progressive refinement (1988), to make interactive rendering possible. After completing his PhD, he joined the Computer Science faculty at Princeton University, where he continued his work on Radiosity, including wavelet radiosity (1993), a more general framework for hierarchical approaches; and “radioptimization” (1993), an inverse method to solve for lighting parameters based on user-specified objectives. All of this work culminated in a 1993 textbook with John Wallace, Radiosity and Realistic Image Synthesis. In a very different research area, Cohen made significant contributions to motion simulation and editing, most significantly: dynamic simulation with kinematic constraints (1987), which for the first time allowed animators to combine kinematic and dynamic specifications; interactive spacetime control for animation (1992), which combined physically-based and user-defined constraints for controlling motion. In 1994, Cohen moved to Microsoft Research (MSR)