Jonathan McKinney

Jonathan McKinney is a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, where they have been since July 2012. Jonathan's research focuses on computational physics and astrophysics, theoretical astrophysics, machine learning, and Markov chain Monte Carlo. Jonathan is particularly interested in testing Einstein's general relativity theory using the Event Horizon Telescope and studying the cosmological formation of galaxies and black holes in the early universe.

Prior to their current position, McKinney was a SciDAC (Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing) postdoc fellow at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from January 2010 to December 2011. There, they worked on massively parallel computations using MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA to accelerate plasma simulations with physics solvers and optimizations (machine learning). Jonathan also spent time as a visiting scholar at Stanford University from December 2016 to December 2018, and as a NASA Einstein Fellow at Stanford University from September 2007 to December 2012. Before that, they were a Harvard Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) Postdoc Fellow at Harvard University from September 2004 to May 2007.

Jonathan McKinney received their B.Sc in Physics from Texas A&M University in 2004. Jonathan then went on to receive their Ph.D and M.S in Physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.