Getting to know Hayley Iben

when I was young I really liked some sports like softball and I was the catcher and the first base player and I also like music I started playing the flute in the fourth grade and from there I played in the main band and i wrenched out and taught myself tenor saxophone and played that Madras band and I was in the marching band and the symphonic band and I was a drum major and lots of different activities with music it was great and high school there were some elective classes that we need to take and my mom was helping me sick and figure out which ones to pick and she had she had gone back to school while I was a kid and she had taken a programming class and she has suggested that I took one of those to see if I liked it and so that's how I got into and I already like computers are love playing with them I remember my parents getting our first computer it was an old 286 and it was just something that was at that point a toy but then learning how to program a computer was was really interesting to me and so I started taking computer classes in ninth grade and all through high school yeah I majored in computer science in the liver art school and got a Bachelor of Science and I also did a minor in mathematics I got a I got a masters and a PhD from UC Berkeley and my master's was in computational geometry and my thesis was on physically bathed simulation for creating crack patterns on surfaces so like mud drying also looked at crackle glass and so that's a way to create crack patterns in in class as and you saw it for like cups and bowls and things like that in my internship and of working on a inverse kinematics problem with any Wiccan hey with my mentor in the research group let's pretend my I want to animate my arm and I would want to grab my wrist and move it here and what inverse kinematics does is it would solve to figure out what are the angles that I'd have move my elbow joint and my shoulder joint to hit the target which is where my wrist is really exciting for me to watch the finished movie for brave I worked in a lot of the technology that was used to animate the characters and to do the hair simulator I were I wrote the inverse kinematic system that was used to move the horses and the humans and I had spent a lot of time trying to make sure that posing tool was right and having that and have Meredith hair fill up the entire screen was incredibly satisfying and to see how how beautiful it all turned out and while I was writing those tools I got scheduled to do an interview with with another coworker for the simulation group because they were looking for a new simulation person and the person who left had done fluids and other types of simulation work that wasn't an area that I was familiar with so I hadn't even thought about this this work this job opening and I think it had been open for about a year where we were talking about it they're having hard time filling this position and the person we were interviewing it was doing a master's thesis and he was implementing some of my a PhD thesis and so after the interview my coworker said he turned to me and said why aren't you applying for this job and that was a really a point in my career to really sit and think like huh why aren't I reply applying for this job and so clearly gave it some consideration and decided like yeah I do want to apply for this job and it's always a little bit scary when you try to do something new but you know it was definitely worth it I didn't listen to the people that were saying like oh you know you should be doing this instead because you should do what your heart tells you and even if it's scary you should go ahead and do it