# Ben Mildenhall

> Ben Mildenhall is a computer graphics and 3D vision researcher, lead author of the NeRF paper, and co-founder of World Labs. His work links neural rendering research at UC Berkeley and Google with spatial AI models and tools for building explorable worlds.

- **Role:** Co-founder at World Labs
- **Organizations:** World Labs, Google Research, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Pixar Research, Fyusion
- **Education:** B.S., Stanford University, PhD in computer science, University of California, Berkeley
- **Known for:** Lead author of the 2020 NeRF paper, recognized with an ECCV Best Paper Honorable Mention., 2020 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize., 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, shared with Pratul Srinivasan.

## Career timeline

- **2014** — Worked at Pixar Research during the summer.
- **2015** — Completed a B.S. at Stanford University and began graduate study at UC Berkeley.
- **2017** — Interned with a Google Research graphics group.
- **2018** — Interned at Fyusion.
- **2020** — Completed a UC Berkeley PhD advised by Ren Ng; led the NeRF paper with collaborators.
- **2021-2023** — Worked as a research scientist at Google Research.
- **2024** — Co-founded World Labs with Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Christoph Lassner.
- **2026** — World Labs introduced Atlas, its multimodal world model.
- **2026-09** — AMD announced an agreement to acquire World Labs; the transaction had not closed as of September 29.

## Achievements

- Lead author of the 2020 NeRF paper, recognized with an ECCV Best Paper Honorable Mention.
- 2020 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize.
- 2021 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention, shared with Pratul Srinivasan.
- Co-author of DreamFusion, which received an ICLR 2023 Outstanding Paper Award.
- 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, shared with Pratul Srinivasan.
- 2025 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, shared with Pratul Srinivasan.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — On September 28, AMD announced an agreement to acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to approvals and other conditions.
- **2026-09** — World Labs introduced Atlas, a multimodal world model for generation, reconstruction, and simulation; Mildenhall joined co-founders in an a16z discussion about it.
- **2026-01** — World Labs announced the World API for creating explorable 3D worlds.
- **2025-11** — World Labs made Marble, its world creation product, available.

## Links

- Website: https://bmild.github.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-mildenhall-86b4739b
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/BenMildenhall
- GitHub: https://github.com/bmild

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ben-mildenhall
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29