Profile

José Luís Encarnação, born in São Domingos de Rana, Portugal, is a distinguished computer scientist and pioneer of computer graphics in Europe. Since 2009, he has been a professor emeritus at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, where he has been a professor since 1975. After graduating from Technische Universität Berlin, he created and promoted the Graphical Kernel System (GKS), the first low-level ISO standard for computer graphics introduced in 1977. GKS was widely used in workstations in the 1980s and early 1990s.

From 1987 to 2006, he was the founding director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research in Darmstadt. He held senior positions in the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and was a consultant for European Union science and technology programs from 2001 to 2007. In 2001, he was elected a member of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and in 2002, he was elected to the Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften. In 2025, he became an honorary member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.

He received several honorary doctorates: from the Technical University of Lisboa (1991), the University of Rostock (1996), the University Estadual de Campinas (2001), and the University of Minho (2002). He is the recipient of numerous awards, namely from ACM and Eurographics, as well as international decorations. In 2001, he was awarded the Military Order of Sant’Iago da Espada and served as consultant for the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.