Dr. Nathaniel Jones is a building scientist, educator, and software developer. He is a senior consultant for the Lighting, Microclimate, and Advanced Technology & Research teams at Arup, a professor of architecture at Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the secretary of the USA affiliate of the International Building Performance Simulation Association. His background spans architectural design, engineering, and computer science.
Nathaniel delivers solutions for healthy and comfortable buildings using engineering and computer science, with an emphasis on fast and accurate tools that aid informed design decisions. He is the developer of Arup's Advanced Comfort Tool, a web tool for thermal comfort modeling, and of Accelerad, a suite of open-source GPU-based lighting and daylighting simulation tools used by architects, engineers, and educators around the world.
In 2017, Nathaniel earned his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As part of the Building Technology program, he performed cutting-edge research in daylighting, visual comfort, and building- and urban-scale energy simulation in the Sustainable Design Lab with Dr. Christoph Reinhart. He is the author of multiple journal and conference papers related to simulation of building energy, daylighting, thermal comfort, and occupant health, and he has regularly been an invited speaker on the application of parallel computation to building simulation.
Accelerad is a free suite of programs for lighting and daylighting analysis and visualization. It speeds up Radiance calculations up to forty times faster using OptiX™, a ray tracing engine built for the graphics processor unit (GPU). Accelerad maintains compatibility with Radiance scene and output file formats and uses a subset of Radiance’s material modifiers and command-line arguments.
Links to some of my published work.
PhD Thesis
My PhD thesis from MIT, Validated Interactive Daylighting Analysis for Architectural Design, on the use of graphics processors to perform fast and accurate daylighting analysis.
Masters Thesis
My master's thesis from Cornell University, Architecture as a Complex Adaptive System, on the design of buildings using evolutionary algorithms.
News features and articles of various interest.