J Turner Whitted (Ph.D. 1978), from Pittsboro, North Carolina, has been named an IEEE Fellow, being recognized for contributions to computer graphics.
The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
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.
Whitted was inducted into the ECE Hall of Fame in 2015 and was named a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus by the College of Engineering in 2005.
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