Ben Mildenhall

Co-Founder

San Francisco, United States

Ben Mildenhall is a co-founder of World Labs and the lead author of the 2020 NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) paper, the breakthrough that established neural volumetric scene representation as a foundation for modern 3D computer vision and graphics. He was a research scientist at Google Research from 2021 to 2023, where he co-authored follow-on work including Mip-NeRF, Mip-NeRF 360, Block-NeRF, Zip-NeRF, and DreamFusion. He received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley in 2020, advised by Ren Ng and supported by a Hertz Fellowship, and did his undergraduate work at Stanford. In 2026 he received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, shared with Pratul Srinivasan, for contributions to radiance field representations and 3D generative AI.

Expertise

• Computer Graphics
• Neural Rendering
• 3D Computer Vision
• Generative Models