Shalini Govil-Pai is an engineer and author of two books on computer graphics. She fell in love with computer graphics as a teenager. Unsurprisingly she went on to get her under-graduate and graduate degrees in computer engineering. And with persistence and single-minded focus she got a job at Pixar Animation. As technical director at Pixar she worked on Toy Story and A Big’s Life. In 2005 she joined Google and now works for Google/YouTube.

In this interview we talk to Govil-Pai about how she discovered her love for computer graphics when she worked on a SGI graphics computer in her father’s lab. What was the first piece of code she wrote? What was it like to be the only female undergraduate student in a class of 35 at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay? How did she land her dream job at Pixar Animations? What is her advice to  young girls who want to study engineering? Tune in to find out.

This interview aired on TV in the US and is part of our Women in Science & Tech Seriessponsored by Zoho Corp.

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