David Frakes
David Harold Frakes is an American engineer, professor, and entrepreneur. He is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow in biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also an adjunct professor of radiology at Mayo Clinic. Frakes is best known for pioneering simulation-based planning for brain surgeries and 3D printing-based planning for heart surgeries. He has worked on computer vision as a Technical Program Lead at Google and on the camera software at Apple, where he focused on the iPhone 11 family of products. Early life and education. Frakes was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1976 . He grew up in Rockford, Illinois, and went to Guilford High School. He attended the Georgia Institute of Technology where he earned four degrees in engineering; BS in electrical engineering, MS in mechanical engineering, MS in electrical engineering, and PhD in bioengineering. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Frakes was a two-sport letterman at Georgia Tech as a placekicker for the football team and a pole vaulter for the track and field team. He was leading scorer for the 1997 Yellow Jackets football team that won the Carquest Bowl and  ranked 25th in the country. Frakes also set the record for the longest field goal in Georgia Tech history under current NCAA rules (53 yards). He signed as a free agent with the Washington Redskins in 1998 and went to preseason camps but did not make the regular season team. Frakes returned to Georgia Tech to coach kickers on the 1998 Yellow Jackets football team that shared the ACC Championship and finished 8th in the country. Career. Frakes started several companies and worked in computational finance before returning to academia in 2008. He joined the faculty at Arizona State University  (ASU) as a jointly appointed professor in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering and the School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering. There he led the Image Processing Applications Laboratory, which covered a range of topics including image and video processing, computer vision, cardiovascular fluid mechanics, and medical devices. Frakes laboratory created pioneering technology for simulating the deployment of endovascular devices into blood vessels in the brain. He was awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the World Technology Network Award in Health and Medicine for that work, which served as the basis for the company EndoVantage  that Frakes cofounded. Frakes was also among the first to apply 3D printing to planning congenital heart defect repairs, and was recognized as Innovator of the Year in the state of Arizona for that work. Frakes held the Fulton Entrepreneurial Professor Chair at ASU until moving to Georgia Tech in 2020. There he is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow, a jointly appointed associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and principal investigator of the Georgia Tech Applied Vision Lab. Frakes also maintains adjunct professor appointments at ASU and Mayo  Clinic. Industry career. In 2015, Frakes went on sabbatical from ASU and joined the Advanced Technologies and Projects group at Google as a Technical Program Lead. He led several different programs there before transitioning one to the Daydream organization, where Frakes led research behind Google's visual search engine product, Lens. In 2019, Frakes left Google to become Lead of Camera Software at Apple where he worked primarily on computational photography. Frakes held that role through launch of the iPhone 11 family of products. He also continued to serve as Chief Science Officer for EndoVantage until the company was acquired  by RapidAI in 2020.