Ren Ng

Ren Ng is an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences whose research connects computer vision, imaging and artificial intelligence. He earned his computer science PhD at Stanford in 2006 and founded Lytro, whose cameras let people change a photograph's focus after taking it. In 2020, he coauthored NeRF, which used a deep neural network to generate new views of scenes from photographs. His later work included PlenOctrees for real-time rendering in 2021 and a 2025 model of how the brain learns color vision. In 2025, he helped develop Oz, a system that stimulates individual cells in the retina and enabled participants to see a color called olo.

Now at: University of California, Berkeley
Works: 101
Citations: 25,875
h-index: 40
Badges: Founder
Bridge

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 28 October 2026.

Timeline

2001–2006

Stanford degrees and light fields

He earns a BS in mathematical and computational science at Stanford in 2001, followed by an MS and PhD in computer science in 2006. His dissertation, Digital Light Field Photography, has Pat Hanrahan, Marc Levoy and Mark Horowitz as advisors. The work receives the 2006 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
2006–2012

Founding Lytro

He founds Lytro after completing his doctorate in 2006. In 2012, the company ships a consumer light field camera that lets people refocus a photograph after it is taken.
2015

Joining the Berkeley faculty

He joins the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2015. His research covers visual computing, including imaging systems, graphics, computer vision and human vision.
2017

A Sloan Research Fellowship

He receives a Sloan Research Fellowship in computer science in 2017.
2020

NeRF generates new views

In 2020, he coauthors NeRF: Representing Scenes as Neural Radiance Fields for View Synthesis with Ben Mildenhall, Pratul P. Srinivasan, Matthew Tancik, Jonathan T. Barron and Ravi Ramamoorthi. The method uses a deep neural network to represent a scene and generate new views from photographs with known camera positions and orientations.
2021

PlenOctrees for real-time rendering

With Alex Yu, Ruilong Li, Matthew Tancik, Hao Li and Angjoo Kanazawa, he coauthors PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields in 2021. The method uses an octree-based 3D representation to render 800-by-800-pixel images at more than 150 frames per second.
2025

Modeling how color vision develops

With Atsunobu Kotani, he presents A Computational Framework for Modeling Emergence of Color Vision in the Human Brain at ICLR in 2025. The framework simulates the eye and uses self-supervised learning to model how the brain develops color vision from optic nerve signals.
April 2025

Oz and the color olo

In April 2025, he and collaborators introduce Oz, a system that uses laser light to stimulate individual photoreceptor cells in the retina. Working with vision scientist Austin Roorda and the research team, he helps participants perceive olo, a blue-green color with saturation beyond normal human vision.
2026

The National Geographic 33

National Geographic includes him and Austin Roorda in its 2026 group of 33 changemakers for their team's work on human color vision and olo.
As of October 2026

Associate professor at Berkeley

As of October 2026, he is an associate professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. His research includes imaging, graphics, computer vision, human vision and artificial intelligence.