Torrance joined Cornell University in 1968 and is associated with the graduate fields of Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering as well as the Program of Computer Graphics. He held a fellowship (1974-75) in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co. Torrance is an ASME Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Physical Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1994 he received the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.