Jonathan Ragan-Kelley

Jonathan Ragan-Kelley is an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His work focuses on high-efficiency computer graphics, where graphics intersect with systems, architecture, and compilers. Before coming to MIT, Ragan-Kelley was an assistant professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, a postdoc at Stanford, and a visiting researcher at Google. He has worked at three major GPU vendors in architecture, compilers, and research, and built a real-time preview system for the special effects industry in collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic. He earned a PhD from MIT, where he helped develop the Halide programming language for image-processing.

Publications

• Dodik, A., Yu, I., Chandra, K., Ragan-Kelley, J., Tenenbaum, J., Sitzmann, V., & Solomon, J. (2025). Meschers: Geometry processing of impossible objects. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 44(4), Article 70, 1–10.
• Ikarashi, Y., Qian, K., Droubi, S., Reinking, A., Bernstein, G. L., & Ragan-Kelley, J. (2025). Exo 2: Growing a scheduling language. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (Vol. 1, pp. 426–444). ACM.
• Zhang, M., Mishra, M., Zhou, Z., Brandon, W., Wang, J., Kim, Y., Ragan-Kelley, J., Song, S. L., Athiwaratkun, B., & Dao, T. (2025). Ladder-Residual: Parallelism-Aware architecture for accelerating large model inference with communication overlapping. In Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (PMLR, Vol. 267). PMLR.

Media

• August 4, 2025: MIT News, MIT tool visualizes and edits “physically impossible” objects
• June 24, 2025: MIT News, The tenured engineers of 2025
• March 13, 2025: MIT News, High-performance computing, with much less code