Anthony J. Yezzi has been named as the Julian T. Hightower Chair Professor, effective October 1. He has been a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology since 1999.

Yezzi has over 20 years of research experience in image processing, computer vision, and shape optimization using geometric partial differential equations. He is the director for the Laboratory of Computational Computer Vision, where he and his group conduct research in the areas of medical imaging, 3D surface reconstruction, and visual tracking.

An active industrial consultant, Yezzi is the founder of Vintinura Imaging, Inc., a startup company that is being hosted by ATDC/VentureLab and is focused on image analysis solutions, particularly those connected with shape detection, tracking, and optimization. He has authored 200 peer-reviewed publications, co-edited a book on shape analysis, holds a patent for 4D cardiac segmentation, and personally developed a complete user-interactive 3D brain segmentation C++ software library, which he licensed to General Electric as part of their commercial MRI image analysis package for 10 years.

A strong proponent of international education opportunities, Yezzi has spent the last five years fostering international relationships between Georgia Tech and top Italian engineering universities. He has been the director of the dual master's degree program between Georgia Tech and Politecnico di Torino (PdT) since 2008. He was also instrumental in developing joint Ph.D. programs between Georgia Tech and both PdT and Politecnico di Milano that were approved last fall by the University System Board of Regents.