Jonathan Wong

About Me

I like working on a variety of side projects ranging from academic research to quirky artsy projects. This webiste is just a place for me to share some of my work with the world in the hopes that some of it is useful, enjoyable, and inspiring. The projects section below highlights some of my notable endeavors. I strongly believe people can enjoy learning and have fun while continually challenging themselves.

In my limited spare time I often enjoy the great oudoors as well as recreational sports. More recently, I have become interested in photography, both as an art form, and as way to apply both my techincal and more artistic hobbies at the same time. Afterall, how many other hobbies encourage me to explore new places, experience interesting situations in creation, while demanding the utmost attention to the physics of light and the mathematics related to image aquisition of sensors? Then there is the whole "ordeal" of post-processing and correcting for distortion.

On occasion I am also a reviewer for the International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering.

At the moment...

I am currently working at a startup in the Bay Area.

Education

I have a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in EECS at U.C. Berkeley (2007). I worked on image registration and finite element simulations of trabecular bone in the Berkeley Orthopaedic Laboratory with Prof. Tony Keaveny. I earned my M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford Uniersity (2009) and my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in (2012) with Prof. Ellen Kuhl.

In 2013, I was the instructor for MEC180/CEC133 Engineering Analysis Using the Finite Element Method at UC Berkeley. It was some nostalgic for me as I had myself taken the class only 7 years prior as an undergraduate. It was a very challenging experience to develop course material and explain seemingly esoteric and advanced concepts. I wrote letters of recommendation for a few students. It was also rewarding and fun to watch students learn and apply fundamental engineering analysis skills to real problems that they proposed. I think I would be interested in teaching again at some point!

Stanford Ph.D. - Working Towards a Heartbeat in a Heartbeat

From 2007-2012, I was a Ph.D. student in the Living Matter Lab (formerly the Computational Biomechanics Lab) at Stanford. My advisor was Prof. Ellen Kuhl. My dissertation is titled "Efficient Computational Modeling of Cardiac Tissue and Resulting Applications". For my dissertation defense presentation in May, 2012, I held a live demonstration of a near-real-time interactive GPU-accelerated finite element heart simulation using the Microsoft Xbox Kinect Sensor.

Featured work: [media 1 - Newsletter] [ media 2 - Newsletter] [ media 3 - ScienceUpdate Article]

I have also developed new sparse matrix vector multiplication algorithms for the GPU (CUDA) with Prof. Eric Darve.. The project is called "warpkernel" and is linked in the paper and here also. It is one of the fastest GPU SPMV algorithms to date.