J. Turner Whitted

Turner Whitted joined NVIDIA in 2014 after 15 years at Microsoft Research where he founded the hardware devices group and managed the graphics group along with a variety of other groups devoted to HCI. He was a co-inventor of the signal processing algorithm for ClearTypeTM. He co-founded Numerical Design Limited in 1983 and served as president and technical director until 1996. Earlier, as a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, he introduced recursive ray tracing as an implementation of global illumination. In his early career he designed digital test equipment, antenna measurement systems, and components of a sonar signal processor.

He earned BSE and MS degrees from Duke University and a PhD from North Carolina State University, all in electrical engineering. He is an adjunct research professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina and adjunct professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. In the past he has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and ACM Transactions on Graphics, was papers chair for SIGGRAPH 97, and served on the SIGGRAPH executive committee. In 2005 he was named a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus by North Carolina State University and in 2013 received ACM SIGGRAPH’s Steven A. Coons Lifetime Achievement Award. He is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.