Rüdiger Westermann, born in Mai 1966, is Professor of Computer Graphics and Visualization in the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität München. He serves as Coordinator of the  Center for Computational and Visual Data Exploration, and he is member of the board of the  TUM International Graduate School for Science and Engineering and the  TUM Institute for Advanced Studies. His research interests include visual data exploration, visual simulation and real-time computer graphics.

He received his Diploma in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 1991 and his Doctoral degree "with highest honours" from the University of Dortmund in 1996. From 1992 to 1997 he was a member of the research staff at the German National Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in St. Augustin, Bonn, where he worked together with Wolfgang Krüger on parallel graphics algorithms. In 1998, he joined the Computer Graphics Group at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg as a Research Scientist. Before he became an Assistant Professor in the Visualization Group at the University of Stuttgart in 1999 he was a Research Assistant in the Mulitres Group at Caltech and a Visiting Professor with the Scientific Computing Laboratory at the University of Utah. In 2001 he was appointed by the RWTH-Aachen as an Associate Professor for Scientific Visualization in the Department of Computer Science. Since 2003, Rüdiger Westermann is Chair of the Computer Graphics and Visualization group at the Technische Universität München.