John C. Hart is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studies computer graphics and data visualization. Prof. Hart received his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work over the past 30 years has been supported by Adobe, AT&T, DARPA, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, NVIDIA and the NSF, and he has partnered with industry on graphics hardware, visual effects, game engine tools and medical imaging. He is the graphics area editor for ACM Books, a past Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, a past member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee, a co-author of “Real-Time Shading,” a contributing author to “Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach,” and an executive producer of the documentary “The Story of Computer Graphics.”

Prof. Hart is the Director of the Office for Professional Education for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In that role, Prof. Hart coordinates the development and launch of new certificate and other professional programs that allow a broader segment of the general public to utilize educational opportunities available from the University of Illinois.

In 2016, Prof. Hart oversaw the launch of the online MCS degree on the Coursera platform, initially as the MCS-DS, a Master of Computer Science degree curriculum that focused on data science. This scalable online platform allows the University of Illinois to better fulfill its land-grant public educational mission by offering an affordable masters degree education in the high-demand areas of computer and data science to a broader student body. Prof. Hart’s Data Visualization course has reached over half a million learners worldwide. In 2017, he was selected as a Fellow of the 2017 Big 10 Academic Leadership Program, and in 2021 he won the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Award for Excellence in Online and Distance Teaching.