Jonathan Kelner is an Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics in the MIT Department of Mathematics and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research focuses on the application of techniques from pure mathematics to the solution of fundamental problems in algorithms and complexity theory. Prior to this, he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2006. Before joining the MIT faculty, he also spent a year as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

He has received a variety of awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award, the NEC Award for Research in Computers and Communication, the Sprowls Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Best Student Paper Award at the Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC). In 2008, he was awarded the Kokusai Denshin Denwa Junior Faculty Chair.