CSAIL's Ragan-Kelley named 2023 Sloan Research Fellow

MIT professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley

Nine members of the MIT faculty are among 126 early-career researchers honored across seven fields with 2023 Sloan Research Fellowships by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Representing the departments of Aeronautics and AstronauticsChemistryEconomicsElectrical Engineering and Computer ScienceMaterials Science and Engineering, Mathematics, and Physics, the honorees will each receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to advance their research.

Including this year’s recipients, a total of 318 MIT faculty have received Sloan Research Fellowships since the first fellowships were awarded in 1955. One of the nine MIT faculty honored this year is Jonathan Ragan-Kelley SM ’07, PhD’14, who is the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in EECS and a Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) affiliate.

At CSAIL, Ragan-Kelley research focuses on computer graphics, compilers, domain-specific languages, and high-performance systems. While completing his PhD at MIT in 2014 under the supervision of professors Frédo Durand and Saman Amarasingh, Ragan-Kelley was instrumental in developing the language and compiler Halide, “a language for fast, portable computation on images and tensors” that has become the “industry standard for computational photography and image processing.” Fast and efficient, Halide was created to make writing high-performance image processing code on modern machines more seamless. His earlier work on the language Lightspeed has been an instrumental tool in producing films, and for those efforts he was a finalist for a technical Academy Award.

Ragan-Kelley previously earned the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher award, NSF CAREER award, Intel Outstanding Researcher award, and two CACM Research Highlights. He was also a visiting researcher at Google and a postdoc in Computer Science at Stanford.

"Sloan Research Fellows are shining examples of innovative and impactful research,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We are thrilled to support their groundbreaking work and we look forward to following their continued success."

Many young researchers awarded the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship have gone on to become prominent figures in science: 56 fellows have received a Nobel Prize in their respective field, 17 have won the Fields Medal in mathematics, and 22 have won the John Bates Clark Medal in economics, including every winner since 2007.