About

I'm a Senior Research Scientist in the High Fidelity Physics group at NVIDIA. Before joining NVIDIA, I did my PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Keenan Crane. I'm broadly interested in developing new algorithms at the intersection of geometry processing, simulation and rendering. My current research explores how core problems in PDE-based geometric computing can be efficiently and reliably solved via grid-free Monte Carlo methods without any volumetric mesh generation, taking inspiration from algorithms for photorealistic rendering. Checkout my PhD thesis for further details.


I've been fortunate to receive Best Paper and Dissertation awards at SIGGRAPH and CMU (2022, 2024, 2025), as well as an Nvidia Graduate Fellowship for work on Monte Carlo PDE solvers. I've also received the Symposium on Geometry Processing best software award for the Boundary First Flattening application to quickly and robustly generate UV maps. Previously, I worked at IrisVR as a core graphics engineer, and received a Bachelor’s in Physics and Computer Science from Columbia University. Find my CV here.

Research

Robust Derivative Estimation with
Walk on Stars

Yu, Sawhney, Miller, Wu, Zhao

SIGGRAPH Asia (2025)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page

Harmonic Caching for
Walk on Spheres

Zhou, d’Eon, Sawhney, Jarosz

SIGGRAPH Asia (2025)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page

State of the Art in Monte Carlo Methods For Partial Differential Equations

Sawhney, Miller, Gkioulekas, Crane

CVPR 26, SIGGRAPH 25, SGP 24 Courses

Project Page &nbsp|&nbsp Talk

Unbiased Differential Visibility Using Fixed-Step Walk-on-Spherical-Caps and Closest Silhouettes

Wu, Morrical, Bangaru, Sawhney, Zhao, Wyman, Ramamoorthi, Lefhon

SIGGRAPH (2025)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page

Solving Partial Differential Equations in Participating Media

Miller, Sawhney, Crane, Gkioulekas

SIGGRAPH (2025)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page

Differential
Walk on Spheres

Miller, Sawhney, Crane, Gkioulekas

SIGGRAPH Asia (2024)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page

Walkin’ Robin: Walk on Stars with Robin Boundary Conditions

Miller*, Sawhney*, Crane†, Gkioulekas†

SIGGRAPH (2024)

Best Paper Award

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page &nbsp|&nbsp Code

Decorrelating ReSTIR Samplers via MCMC Mutations

Sawhney, Lin, Kettunen, Bitterli, Ramamoorthi, Wyman, Pharr

ACM Transactions on Graphics (2023)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Supplemental &nbsp|&nbsp Video &nbsp|&nbsp Talk

Walk on Stars: Grid-Free Monte Carlo for PDEs with Neumann Conditions

Sawhney*, Miller*, Gkioulekas†, Crane†

SIGGRAPH (2023)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Code &nbsp|&nbsp Tutorial &nbsp|&nbsp Talk

Boundary Value Caching for
Walk on Spheres

Miller*, Sawhney*, Crane†, Gkioulekas†

SIGGRAPH (2023)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Code &nbsp|&nbsp Talk

Monte Carlo Geometry Processing: A Grid-Free Approach to PDE-Based Methods on Volumetric Domains

Sawhney, Crane

SIGGRAPH (2020)

Paper &nbsp|&nbsp Project Page &nbsp|&nbsp Code &nbsp|&nbsp Talk

Software

Walk on Spheres Extensions
(formerly Zombie)

Monte Carlo Solvers for Physics Simulation

WoSX &nbsp|&nbsp Zombie

FCPW: Fastest Closest Points
in the West

Fast 3D distance and intersection queries

Project Page

Boundary First Flattening

Quick and robust UV mapping

Project Page

geometry-processing-js

3D geometry processing on the web

Project Page

linear-algebra-js

Sparse & dense matrix routines on the web

Project Page

Misc.

Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning agents playing tag

Report &nbsp|&nbsp Code

Medial Axis Transform

Undergrad. research project on computing medial axis

Report &nbsp|&nbsp Code