Curriculum Vitae

Profile

I am a computational physicist with 16 years of international experience in numerical relativity, parallel high performance computing, numerical algorithms and software development. I am interested in solving problems and building things.

Technical

• Parallel numerical solution of partial differential equations/CFD on supercomputers, focused on binary black hole simulations for gravitational wave science in LIGO
• Scientific software and algorithm/numerical methods development. Numerical methods for adaptive mesh refinement.
• Mathematical modelling of numerical solutions and interfacing of multiple methods
• C/C++, Mathematica, Python, MPI, OpenMP
• Used dozens of supercomputers (XSEDE, PRACE, institute machines) with various schedulers and libraries etc
• Interest in functional languages (Ocaml) and Rust
• Maintainer of the Einstein Toolkit (one of five), the open source numerical relativity community software used by 117 groups worldwide. Framework computing with Cactus.
• Automated code generation for HPC (author of Kranc, at the core of the Einstein Toolkit).
• Continuous integration, code review, expert in Git
• High performance computing, profiling and low and high level optimisation (CPU, CUDA, Intel Xeon-Phi)
• Virtualisation/containerisation
• Realtime simulation monitoring, data validation and archival

Academic

• Instigator and lead on research projects
• Published 35 research papers in the field of binary black hole / gravitational wave science, cited about 2000 times
• Presented dozens of research talks at international conferences, of which 7 were invited or plenary, and chaired conference sessions
• Refereeing (peer review) for several journals
• Lectured students on computational methods and numerical relativity and supervised students on computational projects
• Co-principal investigator on US XSEDE computer time allocations
• Scientific organising committee for international schools/workshops

Experience and education

• 2018-present: Research Software Engineer (permanent), University of Manchester, UK
  • Work on various research projects around the university
  • Software development for radiotherapy treatment planning
  • Neuroscience tractography and streamline tracking
  • High performance computing and optimisation
  • Lattice-Boltzmann methods for hydrodynamics in mechanical engineering
  • Continuous integration and version control in research groups
  • Fostering computational research best-practices
• 2008–2018: Postdoctoral researcher, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany
  • Simulations and science of binary black holes and gravitational waves
  • Member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration
  • Designed, implemented and tested the first complete gravitational waveform model for eccentric binaries constructed using numerical simulations
  • Implementation of improved adaptive mesh refinement method in Einstein Toolkit
  • Development of end-to-end automated infrastructure for producing accurate gravitational waveforms using HPC
  • Led the numerical part of the international 13-institution Numerical Relativity/Analytical Relativity collaboration
  • Led the team which showed the correct asymptotic falloff rate of the Weyl scalars in numerical simulations, correcting previous results
  • Developed and ran the first binary black hole simulations on GPUs
  • Lead author of SimulationTools for Mathematica, a software package for analysis of computational data in Numerical Relativity
  • Led purchase of two large HPC clusters. PhD student selection committee.
• 2005–2008: Postdoctoral researcher, Penn State University, USA
  • Binary black hole science and simulation
  • Used the software developed during my PhD to make the PSU group competitive in the binary black hole field
  • Showed that eccentric binary black holes (BBH) circularise at merger.
  • First comparison between analytical and numerical eccentric BBH waveforms.
• 2002–2005: PhD, School of Mathematics (Applied), University of Southampton, UK
  • Mathematical properties of the Einstein equations and formal stability proof of numerical discretisations. Automatic HPC C++ code generation from a high level symbolic description. Teaching assistant.
• 2001–2002: Software engineer, UGS Solutions, Cambridge, UK
  • Computer Aided Design software development and automated testing. C/C++/Perl.
• 1997–2001: MSci (Hons) First Class in Physics, University of Cambridge, UK
  • Theoretical physics, computer science, mathematics, chemistry
• 1998,1999: Summer vacation student at Raytheon Systems Ltd, Harlow, Essex, UK
  • VHDL embedded electronics, aircraft transponder test software