I am a physicist by training and a computational materials scientist by practice. What keeps me interested in science is something fairly simple: I like problems that I don’t yet know how to solve.
Much of my work involves using computation to understand materials—how atoms arrange themselves, how electrons behave, and how small changes at the microscopic scale can lead to very different properties. Over the years, that curiosity has taken me through density functional theory, quantum materials, high-performance computing, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
I also enjoy building things. When I find myself repeating a complicated scientific task, my instinct is often to ask whether a computer could do more of it for us. That curiosity has led me toward automation and AI for computational science—to give us more time to exercise scientific judgment.
My path has never stayed neatly inside one discipline. I have worked as a software developer, studied materials engineering, trained as a physicist, and now spend much of my time somewhere between physics, materials science, computing, and AI. I have learned to enjoy those boundaries rather than worry too much about which side of them I belong on.
Science is only one part of my life. I am a father, which has probably made me as curious about how a child’s mind develops as I am about how materials behave. I enjoy gardening—the wonderfully low-tech experiment where nature routinely ignores my predictions. I love cooking, where experiments are considerably less reproducible and peer review from my family is much faster. I like long road trips, discovering places without rushing through them, a good glass of wine, and conversations with people whose lives and experiences are very different from mine.