Jonathan Swartz
Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJonathan Swartz is a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA with seven years of focused industry experience and a deep background in computer graphics, rendering, and pipeline engineering. He led Weta Digital’s Katana rollout and USD adoption, architecting lighting and rendering systems used on major films like Avatar: The Way of Water and Avengers: Endgame while managing cross-disciplinary teams and tooling integration. His work spans hands-on shading and FX technical direction through to research-driven neural rendering and machine learning applied to production pipelines. Based in Wellington, he pairs formal training in computer engineering and film studies with a machine learning certificate, enabling a rare blend of artistic sensitivity and technical rigor. Jonathan’s transition from supervising production pipelines to principal research roles at NVIDIA reflects a knack for turning cutting-edge research into production-ready systems. An organizer of complex studio-wide change, he’s equally comfortable prototyping USD exporters as he is developing neural rendering pipelines for next-generation visual effects.
7 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
BA Film Studies Computer Science, BA Film Studies Computer Science at Wesleyan UniversityBSE Computer Engineering, BSE Computer Engineering at Case Western Reserve UniversityCertificate of Proficiency Machine Learning, Certificate of Proficiency Machine Learning at Victoria University of Wellington
Github Skills (36)
sparse10
volume-rendering10
forge10
data-structure10
openframeworks10
openvdb10
voxel10
scene8
python8
deep-learning8
gpu8
conda8
machine-learning8
headers7
neural-network6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
swahtz/openvdb
Aug 2024 - Mar 2025
OpenVDB - Sparse volume data structure and tools
Contributions:76 pushes, 19 branches in 7 months
voxel-foundation/fvdb-test-data
Sep 2024 - Mar 2025
Contributions:2 reviews, 5 PRs, 6 pushes in 6 months
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