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Ben Mildenhall

Co-founder, working on graphics and 3D computer vision, World Labs

  • Co-founder, working on graphics and 3D computer vision, World Labs12

Ben Mildenhall is one of the co-founders of World Labs, where Mildenhall works on problems in graphics and 3D computer vision. Mildenhall was a research scientist at Google Research from 2021 to 2023, and is the first author of the 2020 NeRF paper, which represents scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis.123

At a glance

Current role
Co-founder, working on graphics and 3D computer vision
Company
World Labs
Sector
Company
Education
UC Berkeley
Work listed
2
Honors
2
Sources cited
6
Profile reviewed

Career

Mildenhall received a PhD from UC Berkeley in 2020, advised by Ren Ng and supported by a Hertz fellowship, and had earlier internships in Marc Levoy's group at Google Research in 2017 and at Fyusion in 2018. From 2021 to 2023 Mildenhall was a research scientist at Google Research.2

World Labs names Mildenhall as one of its founders, alongside Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson and Christoph Lassner. Mildenhall's own site describes current work on graphics and 3D computer vision at World Labs.12

Research

Mildenhall was first author of the 2020 NeRF paper on neural radiance fields. Later papers with Jonathan Barron and colleagues extended the approach: Mip-NeRF 360 (2021) handled unbounded scenes, and Zip-NeRF (2023) combined anti-aliasing with grid-based representations.345

Mildenhall also co-authored DreamFusion (2022), which generates 3D content from text prompts using a 2D diffusion model, and ReconFusion (2024), which uses diffusion priors for 3D reconstruction from few images.62

Work and contributions

Timeline

  1. Received a PhD from UC Berkeley, advised by Ren Ng.2
  2. Posted the NeRF paper on neural radiance fields as first author.3
  3. Began work as a research scientist at Google Research.2
  4. Co-authored Mip-NeRF 360 on unbounded anti-aliased neural radiance fields.4
  5. Co-authored DreamFusion on text-to-3D generation with 2D diffusion.6
  6. Co-authored Zip-NeRF on anti-aliased grid-based neural radiance fields.5

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

Honors and recognition

  • ECCV Best Paper Honorable Mention (NeRF) · European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 20202
  • Hertz Fellowship · Fannie and John Hertz Foundation2

Where they work

Suggest a correction or removal

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References

6 sources · profile reviewed Oct 22, 2026 · data updated Oct 22, 2026

  1. About | World LabsWorld Labs · Official page · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  2. Ben Mildenhall — homepageBen Mildenhall · Official page · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  3. NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis (arXiv 2003.08934)arXiv · Paper · published Mar 19, 2020 · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  4. Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields (arXiv 2111.12077)arXiv · Paper · published Nov 23, 2021 · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  5. Zip-NeRF: Anti-Aliased Grid-Based Neural Radiance Fields (arXiv 2304.06706)arXiv · Paper · published Apr 13, 2023 · accessed Oct 22, 2026
  6. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion (arXiv 2209.14988)arXiv · Paper · published Sep 29, 2022 · accessed Oct 22, 2026