John Stratton

John Stratton is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the 3-2 Engineering Program at Whitman College. He holds a Ph.D., M.S., and B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2006–2013). His research focuses on software performance optimization, tools for efficient scientific applications, and compiler optimizations for parallel and GPU-based systems. He leads the Whitman Optimization Laboratory (OptiLab), involving student researchers in projects like biological simulation, image analysis, and programmer productivity tools.

Stratton’s work emphasizes bridging hardware and software efficiency, with contributions to CUDA compilation for FPGAs, parallel thread scheduling, and memory optimization. His pedagogical innovations include group oral presentations in algorithms courses. He has published extensively on topics ranging from kernel fusion in OpenCL to performance portability on shared-memory systems.

Professional contributions include the SPEC ACCEL benchmark suite and the Parboil throughput computing benchmarks. He mentors student researchers and has advised projects on multi-threaded memory allocation, dynamic type acceleration, and thread-block management in multi-core systems.