Wenzel Jakob is an Associate Professor at EPFL, directing the Realistic Graphics Lab (RGL). His highly acclaimed research centers on physically based rendering, appearance modeling, and inverse graphics. He is globally recognized as the creator and lead developer of Mitsuba—a widely adopted, open-source retargetable rendering system tailored for differentiable and inverse rendering research. His technical expertise extends into high-performance systems engineering, having developed foundational open-source frameworks like pybind11, nanobind, and Enoki. Prior to EPFL, Jakob was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich alongside Olga Sorkine-Hornung and holds a PhD from Cornell, co-authoring the standard reference textbook 'Physically Based Rendering'.