Bio: Mike Turitzin was born in Delaware in 1981. He lived in Florida and Virginia before his family settled in Modesto, California when he was 8.

In high school, Mike worked for two years on BloodMage, a fantasy-style game based in id Software's Quake engine, with two other Quake addicts. The game was released in 1999 and was downloaded over 10,000 times from the official website.

After high school, Mike attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science and philosophy as an undergraduate and computer science as a Master's student. His focus in computer science was in graphics. Mike received awards in the graphics department's video game and rendering competitions and, as a junior, wrote ScanView, a program that lets anyone view 3D scans of some of Michelangelo's sculptures (including the David) and the fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae, an ancient marble map of Rome. ScanView has been downloaded tens of thousands of times and has been written up in a range of publications including the Stanford Report, Communications of the ACM, and USA Today.

Following ScanView, Mike coauthored a SIGGRAPH 2004 paper on the project that later was presented in a Communications of the ACM cover article. As a Master's student, Mike did human face rendering work with Ron Fedkiw. Some of the images he generated can be seen in a SIGGRAPH 2005 paper.

Mike joined Google as a software engineer in 2005, where he worked for over 3 years on the indexing and query-serving components of the main search engine. While at Google, he received Founders' and Executive Management Group awards for his work.