Ping Fu

Ping Fu (born in 1958) is a Chinese-American entrepreneur. She co-founded the 3D software development company Geomagic and was its chief executive officer until February 2013, when 3D Systems Inc acquired it. As of March 2014, she is the Vice President and Chief Entrepreneur Officer at 3D Systems. Fu grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and moved to the United States in 1984. 

She co-founded Geomagic in 1997 with her then-husband Herbert Edelsbrunner and has been recognized for her achievements with the company through a number of awards, including being named Inc. magazine's 2005 "Entrepreneur of the Year." In 2013, she published her memoir Bend, Not Break, co-authored with MeiMei Fox. Ping Fu was born in 1958 in Nanjing, China, where her father was a professor at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA).

Fu spent her childhood and early adulthood in China. She grew up during the Cultural Revolution when she was separated from her parents for several years. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, she attended a college that later became Suzhou University studying Chinese literature. Fu has related in interviews and her memoir that she chose to research China's one-child policy for her thesis and traveled to the countryside, where she found that infanticide of female infants was common, as was abortion, even late into pregnancy.

After turning in her research, Fu said that she believes it was passed to a newspaper editor who wrote an editorial on the infanticide of female children. Fu has stated that she was later briefly imprisoned by government officials and was told to leave the country. After this event, she left school without graduating. Fu left China and arrived in the United States in January 1984. She initially enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM) in Albuquerque. Still she later moved to San Diego to study computer science as an undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego. 

During her time in San Diego, Fu worked part-time at a software company called Resource Systems Group as a programmer and database software consultant. After graduating from UC San Diego with a bachelor's degree in computer science, she moved to Illinois, where she worked with Bell Labs. The company offered a Ph.D. assistance program, through which Fu enrolled in the computer science Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). At UIUC, she completed a master's degree in computer science.

In the early 1990s, Fu began working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. She focused on computer graphics and visualization, including projects such as developing the morphing software for the animation of the liquid metal T-1000 robot in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. 

While at NCSA, she hired student researcher Marc Andreessen and was his supervisor on the project developing NCSA's Mosaic, an early multimedia web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. According to her supervisor, Joseph Hardin, Fu was one of the managers involved in the discussions from which the idea for the browser was developed. In 1994 Ping took a temporary position at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, returning to NCSA in 1995.