Miguel Sainz received his degree in Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnical University of Catalonia, UPC,(Spain) in 1996 and a PhD. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine in 2003. He started doing research in computer vision in 1993 working on image processing and pattern recognition. He worked as student researcher in the Cybernetics Institute of Barcelona and after graduation he worked in computer vision and robotics projects at the Industrial Robotics and Informatics Institute developing some production solutions collaborating with industrial partners. In 1998 Miguel joined the Computer Graphics Section of the UPC and started growing a strong interest in Computer Graphics while developing some special effects for a realtime VR simulator.

In 1999 started his PhD. research at the Image Based Modeling and Rendering Lab at the University of California, Irvine, where Miguel Sainz developed a complete automatic image based modeling and rendering pipeline for modeling real objects from a video sequence or set of images and render these models using the most advanced video cards programability to achieve photorealistic novel images. He was for a year a post-doc and part time lecturer at the School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.