While at Cornell, Rushmeier collaborated with Kenneth Torrance and Donald P. Greenberg. After obtaining her Ph.D., Rushmeier joined the mechanical engineering faculty as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, where she taught courses on heat transfer and numerical methods and conducted research on computer graphics image synthesis. She left in 1991 to join the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she focused on scientific data visualization. She continued to investigate problems in data visualization as a staff member at the IBMThomas J. Watson Research Center from 1996 to 2004.[3] She then assumed her current position as professor of computer science at Yale University, where she served as chair of the department from 2011 to 2014 and again starting in 2023.[4] With Julie Dorsey, she leads the computer graphics laboratory at Yale.
Rushmeier is particularly interested in scanning and modeling shape and appearance, as well as the applications of computer graphics in cultural heritage. At IBM, she worked on the project to create a 3D model of Michelangelo's Florence Pietà,[5] as well as the Eternal Egypt collaboration between IBM and the government of Egypt to build a digital showcase of the country's cultural artifacts.
Rushmeier is also noted for her work on global illumination, material capture, and the display of high-dynamic-range images. Her contributions to the field of computer graphics include the development of methods for solving for illumination in the presence of participating media (i.e. environments such as fog and murky water that affect the light passing through them) and the extension of the radiosity method to handle specularBRDFs.
She has served in numerous editorial and technical capacities, including editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics from 1996 to 1999,[6] editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 1996 to 1998, and co-editor-in-chief of Computer Graphics Forum from 2010 to 2014. She was chair of the papers committee for ACMSIGGRAPH in 1996 and co-chair of the IEEE Visualization papers committee in 1998, 2004, and 2005. She is an ACM Distinguished Engineer, a 2016 Fellow of the ACM,[7] a 2011 Fellow of the Eurographics Association,[8] the recipient of the 2013 ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award,[9] and the recipient of the 2021 Eurographics Gold Medal.[10]
In 2022, Rushmeier joined a research team involving computer scientists, archaeologists, and historians, the projects aim is to research the ancient city of Dura-Europos. The project received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities in order to develop a digital archive of materials related to Dura-Europos. Rushmeier is involved with creating a virtual cloud to host this data and create a user interface that allows researchers to access data and add new information.[11]
Dorsey, Julie; Rushmeier, Holly; Sillion, François (2007). Digital Modeling of Material Appearance. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. ISBN9780122211812.
