Tech-X Corporation Staff
Dan Abell, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Abell received his BA in physics from Swarthmore College, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Maryland at College Park. He was awarded the 1996 APS Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Beam Physics. Dr. Abell has been a research associate at Brookhaven National Lab and the University of Maryland, with extended visits to CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and KEK in Japan.
Dr. Abell is an expert in differential algebra and the calculation of symplectic maps for use in both the analysis and design of accelerator systems, as well as for pushing particles. At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Abell works on particle tracking codes, including the MAD Pro technology.
Cory Ahrens, Ph.D. Associate Research Mathematician
Dr. Cory Ahrens received his BS and MS degrees in nuclear engineering from Kansas State University and the University of Michigan in 1999 and 2001, respectively. While completing his MS degree, Dr. Ahrens focused on developing new Monte Carlo algorithms for radiative transfer problems in participating media and asymptotic approximations for charged particle transport. In 2006, Cory completed his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, working with Prof. Mark Ablowitz on modeling nonlinear laser pulse interactions in fiber-optic communication systems.
After completing his Ph.D., Dr. Ahrens joined the research group at Terralliance, an oil/gas company. While at Terralliance, Cory developed new time/frequency filters for detecting gas signatures in seismic data. In 2007, he returned to the University of Colorado at Boulder as a research associate, working with Prof. Gregory Beylkin. While at CU, Dr. Ahrens and Professor Beylkin developed new quadratures for the sphere, which will play a key role in developing new algorithms for processing data collected on a sphere, for example, data collected by satellites. Dr. Ahrens's research interests include inverse problems, nonlinear wave propagation, radiation transport and convex optimization. He joined Tech-X Corporation in January 2010.
Keegan M. Amyx, M.S. Research Assistant
Keegan Amyx received his B.S. in Engineering Physics and his M.S. in Physics from the University of Colorado in 2007. His work for LASP (Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado) and CIPS (Center for Integrated Plasma Studies at the University of Colorado) focused on ion optics, mass spectrometer instrument design, rarefied air flow simulation, and mesospheric dust particle simulation. In addition to his experience with numerical simulations, Keegan has significant experience in the emerging field of General-Purpose Computing on Graphical Processing Units. He joined Tech-X Corporation in the fall of 2007.
Balamurali Ananthan, M.S. Software Developer II
Balamurali Ananthan received a M.S in Computer Science in 2003 from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago where his area of specialization was Computer Networking and Telecommunications. Mr. Ananthan received his undergraduate degree in Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Engineering from Government College of Technology at Coimbatore, India in 2000. Mr. Ananthan has almost 4 years of experience as a software developer, including work in large enterprise environments and National Laboratories.
Mr. Ananthan joined Argonne National Labs as a research intern where he worked closely with the Globus Development team and developed applications based on Open Grid Service Architecture for Fusion Grid in collaboration with scientists at Argonne National Labs, Princeton Plasma Physics Labs and General Atomics Laboratory. The software that was developed during the research provides a reliable Application Service based on a Service Level Agreement, which promises a crisp end-to-end QoS in the Grid Environment. Mr. Ananthan's core expertise is in Java, Grid Services and Web Services development in particular. Mr. Ananthan joined Tech-X in the February of 2004.
Travis Austin, Ph.D. Research Mathematician
Dr. Austin received a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2001. For his thesis, he extended a least-squares method for the neutron transport equation to be applicable to anisotropic scattering problems and developed a robust multigrid solution method for the resulting discrete system of equations. He spent two years as a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on the development of multigrid solvers for massively parallel computing systems and most recently two and a half years at the University of Auckland's Bioengineering Institute where he worked on bio-electrical modeling of the heart and the guts. His expertise is in the development and usage of multigrid methods.
George Bell, Ph.D. Research Mathematician
George Bell received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College in 1982, and worked at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for a year as a software engineer under Phil Morton. He received a PhD in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1989. His thesis concerned an ideal 2D fluid model including the Coriolis force, a simplified model of geophysical flows in the atmosphere and ocean. This was followed by a two year post doc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, with research into ocean eddy and jet dynamics. He then detoured into industry, where he applied combinatorial optimization to telecommunication network design and process improvement in the R&D division of US West (now Qwest), the local telephone company.
Dr. Bell has published papers in a wide variety of fields, including fluid dynamics, operations research, and combinatorial game theory. His current work at Tech-X focuses on electron cooling simulations using VORPAL.
Richard Busby, M.S. Research Assistant
Mr. Busby received a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from North Carolina State University in 1997 and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado in 2000. He has worked on various projects involving scientific computing and software documentation. Mr. Busby's research interests include topics ranging from the biophysics of proteins to artificial neural network simulations of psychological systems.
Johan Carlsson, Ph.D. Principal Research Scientist
Dr. Carlsson has an M.S. in Engineering Physics from the Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden, and received his Ph.D. in Fusion Plasma Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology, also in Sweden. Dr. Carlsson is a computational plasma physicist with a focus on computer science and applied mathematics, and is an experienced C++ developer with expertise in object-oriented design, distributed and parallel programming, and scientific computing.
Dr. Carlsson was a research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a research assistant at the Royal Institute of Technology. At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Carlsson focuses on enhancing plasma-modeling codes, and was the principal investigator for the US DOE project "Direct Numerical Simulation of ICRF Wave-Particle Interaction."
Yongjun Choi, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Choi received a B.A. and M.A. in Astrophysics from Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea and his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His thesis work focused on modeling channel plasma and magnetic field effect on the plasma plume of the D55 Hall thruster using PIC code.
His main research interests are in development of models to simulate physical processes, development of numerical algorithms, and application of the models and algorithms to real systems. At Tech-X, he works on developing VORPAL and its applications in various plasma devices. Also, he works on modeling the process of field evaporation.
Estelle Cormier-Michel, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Estelle Cormier-Michel earned her double Masters degree in Particle Physics and Engineering at the University of Strasbourg, France in 2000. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris, France, in 2003, where she worked on developing simulations and data analysis programs applied to the detection of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays.
From 2004 to 2009 Dr. Cormier-Michel was a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Wim Leemans group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where she developed and used particle-in-cell codes (including VORPAL) to model laser plasma accelerators. Estelle joined Tech-X Corporation in 2010, where she continues to work on simulation of laser plasma accelerators and other advanced accelerator concepts.
Ben Cowan, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Cowan received a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2007. For his doctoral studies, he developed simulations of dielectric photonic crystal structures for laser-driven particle acceleration. He investigated accelerating mode properties, coupling, and beam dynamics. He also performed experiments on ultrafast optical breakdown in silicon, and assisted with the Laser Electron Acceleration Program experiments.
Dimitre A. Dimitrov, Ph.D. Principal Scientist
Dr. Dimitrov's received a B.S. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria and his Ph.D. in Statistical and Condensed Matter Physics from Kansas State University in 1997. From 1997-2000, Dr. Dimitrov was a post-doctoral research associate in the Theoretical Division, Statistical and Condensed Matter Physics Group, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Dr. Dimitrov designed and implemented hybrid codes and algorithms, a combination of Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics, for the solution of the Landau-Lifshitz spin equation of motion at finite temperatures. This lead to the first study of vortex lifetimes in layered magnets and the surface effects on the hysteresis curves of nanosized magnetic particles.
Dr. Dimitrov's experience in plasma physics includes his contribution to the OOPIC code on tunneling ionization. Results from this work were presented at three conferences, one of which was an invited talk, and published in a "Physics of Plasmas" paper. His current work at Tech-X Corporation includes physics research and software design and development on a number of current projects.
His research interests include computational and experimental electromagnetics, advanced particle acceleration techniques, satellite navigation systems, and high energy physics computing and instrumentation.
Marc Durant Software Developer II
Mr. Durant graduated from the Cornell University School of Engineering in 2000 with a B.S. in Computer Science. His primary focus of studies was Artificial Intelligence and Human Perception and Cognition. After graduating he worked for the National Security Agency for three years, then started his own company to work on contract with the agency. He joined Tech-X in 2008 and is currently working in the Distributed Technologies group.
David Fillmore, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Fillmore received a B.A. in Physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with an emphasis in high energy particle physics, in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and Planetary Science from the University of Colorado in 2006. His doctoral studies focused on modeling the radiation balance of the Earth's climate system and its modulation by natural and anthropogenic aerosols. He worked as a graduate student and research associate for six years at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), Boulder, in the CGD (Climate and Global Dynamics) division, while collaborating in part with the NASA CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) satellite project.
Dr. Fillmore has broad research interests in atmospheric physics, which currently include high performance object-oriented 3D radiative transfer modeling in clouds and fast data analysis and visualization of satellite remote sensing and climate model datasets. He is well versed in 4th generation languages such as IDL (Interactive Data Language) and object-oriented languages such as C++.
Michael Galloy, Ph.D. Associate Research Scientist
Dr. Galloy received a B.S. in Mathematics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 1998. He was a member of the faculty of Black Hills State University, designed and implemented algorithms to optimize networks for US WEST, and instructed and consulted in the use of the Interactive Data Language (IDL) for Research Systems, Inc. He maintains the IDLdoc project for generating API documentation for IDL code. Dr. Galloy has over ten years teaching experience.
Steve Goldhaber, Ph.D. Associate Computer Scientist
Dr. Steve Goldhaber received his BS and PhD degrees in physics from MIT. Dr. Goldhaber performed his undergraduate research in infrared astrophysics at Kitt Peak National Observatory and his PhD research in quantum chromodynamics. Dr. Steve "goldy" Goldhaber worked at Thinking Machines where he developed design tools for the Connection Machine series of parallel computers. Steve was also a member of the team that designed and implemented the C* parallel compiler. Dr. Goldhaber has performed extensive work consulting with universities, companies and national labs on parallelizing and optimizing codes on the Connection Machine Systems, and created the communications compiler to optimize parallel communication. At Compatible Systems, where he was the Virtual Private Networking (VPN) systems architect, Steve designed and implemented LAN to LAN and client to LAN VPN technology. This technology was acquired by Cisco systems in 2000 and is still in use in their VPN product line.
At Tech-X, Dr. Goldhaber is working on particle accelerator simulation codes in collaboration with Fermilab.
Ammar Hakim, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Hakim received his Ph.D from the University of Washington, Seattle, in 2006. He has worked on developing high performance distributed algorithms for the solution of hyperbolic conservation laws, with focus on plasma science applications. The algorithms are being used to study high order moment-equations of the Vlasov-Maxwell system and equations of Magnetohydrodynamics. Some successful applications of the algorithms are to collisionless magnetic reconnection, Field Reversed Configurations and Z-Pinches. Previously he has developed software to study radiative transfer and used it for calculating light distribution inside and emerging from the ocean.
Ben Jamroz, Ph.D. Associate Research Mathematician
Dr. Ben Jamroz received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009. Dr. Jamroz's thesis work involved multi-scale modeling of the equations of magnetohydrodynamics. Here, he derived asymptotic regimes of physical relevance and developed numerical models to investigate the resulting systems. Ben's interest lies in scientific computation, in particular, the development of parallelizable algorithms to model partial differential equations.
Thomas Jenkins, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Thomas Jenkins received a Ph.D. in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University (working at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory) in 2007, subsequent to receiving B.S. and M.S. degrees (Physics) from Brigham Young University in 1999 and 2000. At PPPL, Tom's doctoral research focused on fundamental numerical issues which arise in gyrokinetic particle-in-cell simulations, such as discrete particle noise, discrete-to-continuum interpolation issues, Monte Carlo integration techniques, and the problem of growing weights. After leaving Princeton, he began working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a part of the SciDAC Center for Simulation of Wave Interactions with MHD (SWIM) project. There, he investigated various physical and numerical issues associated with the development of self-consistent numerical simulations of neoclassical tearing mode suppression via electron cyclotron current drive, conducting software development for both MHD (NIMROD) and rf (GENRAY) codes.
At Tech-X, Dr. Jenkins is continuing his SWIM research in ECCD-induced NTM suppression simulations, and is also involved in other development projects to further expand the physics capabilities of the NIMROD code. His professional interests, in addition to the aforementioned subjects, include multiple-weight algorithm development for PIC simulation, nonneutral plasma modeling, and the numerical solution of integral equations.
Chetan Jhurani, Ph.D., Associate Research Mathematician
Dr. Chetan Jhurani earned his Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin. Working with Prof. Leszek Demkowicz, Dr. Jhurani developed a new numerical homogenization method for computing effective material properties of heterogeneous media. He integrated this technique with finite element method and a-posteriori error analysis to solve large-scale nonlinear polymer elasticity problems efficiently.
Dr. Jhurani has extensive experience in using scientific computing software, and designing and writing C++ codes that use generic programming techniques for fast and extensible libraries. Chetan's research interests include numerical homogenization, sparse matrix algorithms, applications of numerical optimization, and trajectory planning for mobile robotics. Earlier in his career, he worked in the computer aided design and seismic data processing industries.
Dr. Chetan Jhurani joined Tech-X Corporation in April, 2010.
Krishna R. Kantam, M.S. Software Developer I
Krishna Kantam received his B.S in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry from Sir C R Reddy Autonomous College, Eluru, India, and an M.S. in Information Technology from Sikkim-Manipal University, Manipal, India. Mr. Kantam has 6 years of experience as a software developer and consultant, including work for multi-national companies like Dell, Accenture, and Sodexho. He has experience in developing web services, relational database management systems, UML Modeling, Test Driven Development, and unit testing on a variety of platforms with several modern programming languages.
Mr. Kantam's primary focus now is the development and implementation of User Interfaces for Thin- and Thick- Client based applications and writing Web Services for Multitier Distributed Architectures like Orbiter. Krishna joined the Tech-X Corporation in February 2010 and is currently working in the Systems Integration Group located in Buffalo, New York.
Dan Karipides, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Karipides received B.S. degrees in Physics and in Aeronautics from Miami University in Oxford, OH, in 1993 and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University in 1999. The focus of his research while at Cornell was rarefied gas dynamics and molecular surface chemistry. Specifically, he used statistical simulation techniques to investigate the production of visible phenomenon from blunt objects in low Earth orbit.
After Cornell, Dr. Karipides spent six years as a research scientist in Austin, TX, at Trilogy. While in Austin, his main area of research was into data mining in general and into the shopping patterns and recognizable characteristics of online shoppers in particular. A system was developed that using recorded traffic from online, automotive websites could cull serious shoppers from the casual browsers and predict feature-level demand before shoppers visited dealer showrooms.
At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Karipides continues to explore problems in rarefied gas dynamics, including the application of using graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the dynamics calculations. Additionally, he has been involved with projects ranging from web-based application development, remote visualization of very large data sets, semantic web programming and searching, and relational database schema design.
Matthew Koch, M.S. Software Developer I
Matthew Koch received a B.A. in Computer Science in 2005 from Knox College and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado with a certificate in Cognitive Science in 2009. Matt has worked primarily on web development and build systems. His research interests include natural language processing, machine learning, and education technology.
Alex Likhanskii, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Alex Likhanskii received his Ph.D in Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2009. Dr. Likhanskii's work was focused partially on the development of comprehensive theoretical and efficient numerical models for the description of the dielectric barrier discharge plasma actuators and partially on the description of high-intensity ultra-short pulse laser drilling. His research interests are theoretical and numerical description of the gas discharges, plasma aerodynamics and laser-material interaction.
Ming-Chieh Lin, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Ming-Chieh Lin received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrophysics from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Dr. Lin's training was in condensed matter, especially low-dimensional nano-semiconductors. He worked on high power microwave/millimeter wave tubes for many years with CSIST, Taiwan. He also worked with Klystron/Microwave Department at SLAC, USA, as a visiting physicist, designing sheet beam klystrons for future linear colliders. Dr. Lin extended his interest to high-performance scientific computing while working at NCHC, Taiwan as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Dr. Lin built a homemade 64-bit PC cluster and worked on ab inito calculations of nano-materials at FJU, Taiwan. Dr. Lin has also collaborated with PTSG at UC Berkeley on electron emission and THz devices for many years as a visiting scholar.
Dr. Lin has more than ten years of simulation experience with both FEM and FDTD PIC method. His research interests include high power microwave physics, THz devices, photonic crystals,nano-semiconductors, electron emission mechanisms, ab initio calculations, and parallel computations. Dr. Lin is a research scientist with Tech-X, working on 3D conformal finite-difference time-domain particle-in-cell simulations of plasmas, microwave tubes, field emission, and photonic crystals, and consulting on some advanced designs.
Michael Loh, M.S. Software Developer II
Michael Loh received his M.S. in Physics from the University of Chicago in 2007. Mr. Loh's research focused on galaxy cluster detection using interferometric techniques in which the presence of a cluster was determined by examining distortion in the CMB as predicted by the Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect.
Prior to joining Tech-X, Mike Loh worked on the developement and implementation of financial models that were used to predict mortgage behavior for a start up hedge fund in Connecticut. Mike has extensive software development experience in C, C++, and Matlab. He is currently interested in high performance computing and parallelization.
John Loverich, Ph.D. Computational Research Scientist
John has a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Washington where he studied high resolution methods in computational fluid plasma physics. Before joining Tech-X he worked at the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards investigating discontinuous Galerkin methods for MHD, and Hall MHD applied to problems in plasmoid accelerator modeling for spacecraft propulsion.
Sudhakar Mahalingam, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Mahalingam received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Wright State University (WSU) at Dayton, Ohio in 2007. His research mainly focused on understanding the ion engine discharge chamber plasma using Particle-in-cell (PIC) codes. For his dissertation, he implemented a parallel Poisson solver and enabled the capabilities such as modeling of different charge state species, coulomb collisions and tracking of neutrals in a PIC-MCC code. He validate his numerical results with the experimental data provided by NASA on NSTAR ion thrusters. He completed M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from WSU in 2002 with a thesis on modeling the primary electrons in the ion engine discharge chamber. Dr. Mahalingam's projects were supported by NASA Glenn Research Center and WSU Graduate School. He received B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Thiagarajar College of Engineering at Madurai, India. Prior coming to US, he worked three years as a Mechanical Engineer with SPIC Limited, India.
Dr. Mahalingam's research interests are on developing numerical codes based on PIC-MCC and hybrid fluid algorithms to study various plasma devices. He has hands-on experience with programming languages such as C++, Fortran, and MPI.
James Matykiewicz, M.S. Software Developer II
Mr. Matykiewicz received a Master of Science degree in Physics from Northern Illinois University, Dekalb in 1988 where his area of specialization was Experimental Low Temperature Solid State Physics. James has 20 years of experience in software engineering, including developing applications for scientific data acquisition, data analysis and visualization, data mining and predictive modeling, enterprise solutions (EAI) for application integration, and web service frameworks and applications for distributed geospacial data processing.
While working on his M.S., James collaborated with the the Solid State Division at Argonne National Labs to investigate phonon softening and phase stability in magnetic superconductors.
James has a rich history of co-developing software and hardware solutions for materials science research. He helped develop new standards, techniques and tools for magnetometers and susceptometers while at Quantum Design, San Diego, CA and Lake Shore Cryotronics, Westerville, OH.
As a software engineer at NetMap Analytics, LLC, in Westerville, OH, James help develop new algorithms, applications and visualization tools for link-analysis data mining. He was the architect and senior engineer responsible for creating an expert system for predicting insurance fraud.
While at UNAVCO, Inc., Boulder, CO. Mr Matykiewicz was responsible for creating software applications for managing the engineering and construction, data acquisition, data processing, and data product discovery and delivery portals at the Plate Boundary Observatory.
As part of his responsibilities at Tech-X, James is working to develop new web services for managing grid computing resources. He is a member of the User Centric Monitoring (UCM) team developing new web tools for managing Grid job scheduling and status. James is also helping to develop new and improved web services for the automatic management of Grid software applications, and their dependencies, as part of the Grid Software Management Framework (GSIMF) team.
Paul Mullowney, Ph.D. Research Mathematician
Dr. Mullowney received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Boston University and his Ph.D. in Applied Math from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His thesis work focused on passive scalar mixing and transport studies in 3D hydrodynamic systems. Upon completing his Ph.D., Dr. Mullowney took a post-doc position at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. There he worked on problems in mathematical biology including population dynamics and Neuro-Informatics. His work in Neuro-Informatics is ongoing.
Since joining Tech-X in September of 2006, Dr. Mullowney has worked on the Plasma Simulation code VORPAL. In addition, he developed the MATLAB interfaces to the GPULib open-source library. His general interests are in high-performance computing with special emphasis on performance analysis and algorithm/software development for neuronal data analysis.
Stefan Muszala, Ph.D. Computer Scientist
Stefan Muszala received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2007. His work, in close collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado, Denver involved improving the performance of parallel and distributed Climate Models, Molecular Dynamics codes and Ocean Models through the use of new load balancing methods. Prior to his work at CU Boulder and NCAR, Stefan worked for Fugro Airborne Surveys and Fugro McClelland Marine Geosciences as a data processor and analyst. His work for Fugro was preceded by a study of physics, geology and geophysics at the University of Texas, Austin, Institute for Geophysics and Rutgers College.
At Tech-X Corporation, some of Stefan's current projects include Common Component Architecture implementation and large-scale scientific visualization. Other interests include computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing, high performance computing and load balancing techniques.
Chet Nieter, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Nieter received a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics, graduating Summa Cum Laude from The Ohio State University, and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU).
While a research associate at CU's Center for Integrated Plasma Studies, Dr. Nieter was a principal developer for the numerical simulation package VORPAL used in computational plasma physics research. Dr. Nieter's involvement also included research projects using VORPAL to study Laser Wakefield Acceleration and electron Bernstein heating of fusion plasmas and the presentation of the results at various scientific conferences.
Additionally, while a CU research assistant, Dr. Nieter conducted computational particle physics research, running Monte Carlo simulations of quark/gluon systems on DEC Alpha work stations and Cray supercomputer again presenting the results at an international conference. At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Nieter works on C++ software development projects for plasma simulation, including the VORPAL technology.
Kevin Paul, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Paul received his B.S. in Physics from Illinois State University and his Ph.D. in Theoretical Particle Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His thesis work included developing a fast algorithm for Monte Carlo computation of QCD interaction cross-sections based on the color-flow technique and computing interaction cross-sections for associated Higgs-boson production with a single top quark. Dr. Paul held two subsequent post-docs, the first with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the second with Muons, Incorporated, both developing and simulating beamline technology for muon colliders and neutrino factories.
Dr. Paul has experience with particle tracking and beamline simulation codes, as well as targetry, radiation and particle production simulation codes such as MARS and G4beamline (based on GEANT4). At Tech-X Corporation, Dr. Paul is assisting in the development of particle tracking codes.
Alexander Pletzer, Ph.D. Principal Research Scientist
Dr. Pletzer received his PhD from the Australian National University, Canberra in 1992 in the field of theoretical physics and plasma physics. He has been active in the fields of plasma physics and climate modeling and has contributed to a number of open source projects. He was lead or co-lead in the development of the non-ideal version of Princeton Equilibrium and Stability (PEST3) code, the PSPLINE library for computing spline interpolations in up to three dimensions, ELLIPT2D for solving elliptic equations on unstructured meshes, GRIN for solving elliptic equations using the boundary element method, and NCVTK for visualizing planetary data on the sphere, among other projects.
Dr. Pletzer is actively involved in developing the plasma core transport model in the FACETS SciDAC project. His general interests are in scientific computing with emphasis in solving partial differential equations, high performance computing, and mixed language (Fortran, C++, Python) programming.
Ilya Pogorelov, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Ilya Pogorelov graduated with a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and earned an MS in Astronomy and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Florida. Prior to joining Tech-X Corporation, he held research positions at the University of Florida, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Northern Illinois Center for Accelerator and Detector Development.
Dr. Pogorelov joined the Accelerator Technology group at Tech-X in 2008, where his work has focused on novel computational techniques for modeling nonlinear effects in RF devices and on modeling collective effects in beam dynamics. In addition to computational accelerator physics and beam dynamics, his research interests include nonlinear dynamics, nonequilibrium statistical physics, and applied and computational mathematics.
Roopa Pundaleeka, M.S. Software Developer II
Ms. Pundaleeka received her MS degree in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Her M.S. research work concentrated on integration of components developed in different languages. It explores the integration of Java and C++ components. The work was part of the Boeing's Open Experimental Platform (OEP) from DARPA Program Composition for Embedded System (PCES). Her work enabled the CORBA applications (OEP) to plug-in different event channel using either Framework for Aspect Composition EvenT channel (FACET), a customizable Event Channel developed using Java and AspectJ, or TAO Real-Time Event Channel (RTEC) developed in C++, transparently and efficiently.
She is currently working on a project called CoReViz, which allows data analysis and visualization of very large data sets on remote servers, while viewing and manipulating complex two- and three-dimensional graphical objects locally in real time. FarSight is a client/server system that uses both secure shell utilities (such as ssh and scp) and CORBA.
Srilakshmi Ramireddy, M.S. Software Developer I
Ms. Srilakshmi Ramireddy received her M.S. degree in Management Information Systems (MIS) from the University at Buffalo in 2009. Ms. Ramireddy received her B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Kakinada, India. Before earning her M.S., Ms. Ramireddy worked at Tata Consultancy.
Ms. Ramireddy joined the Tech-X Systems Integration Group in October, 2009. She plans to use her skills developing a user-centric approach to bridge the gap between the scientists and software developers. Ms. Ramireddy has published works in the field of cloud computing and is experienced in software lifecycle and requirements use case and traceability methods.
Vahid H. Ranjbar Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Ranjbar completed his Ph.D. while working at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) under the guidance of Dr. S. Y. Lee of Indiana University in Bloomington and Dr. Waldo MacKay of BNL. There his focus was on the AGS and RHIC polarized proton runs. Later he worked as a research associate in Fermilab's Accelerator Division in the Tevatron Department and the Accelerator physics department. During which time he developed several new applications important for the Tevatron's daily operation. These included a head-tail chromaticity measurement system and an orbit stabilization system.
As a result of this work he was awarded two letters of recognition from the Accelerator department head. In addition to operations work he has continued research in the areas of collective effects of beam motion, in particular chromatic and impedance extrapolation from measured transverse beam profiles. In addition he has been involved with work concerning beam-beam simulation codes for RHIC and the LHC. He currently works as a research scientist at Tech-X contributing to simulation work related to RHIC-II e-cooling upgrade project and the development of spin tracking codes.
Christine Roark, M.S. Research Assistant
Ms. Roark received a B.S. in Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics from the University of Iowa in 2004. She then went on to receive an M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics focused on plasma physics at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2006. Her previous research includes spectral analysis of a flare star for the NRAO using data gathered from the Hubble Space Telescope, and 2-Dimensional MHD plasma modeling of a Z-Pinch at UW.
Brian Schwartz, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Brian Schwartz received his B.A. in Physics from Swarthmore College in 1997 and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2005. For his doctoral research Dr. Schwartz developed original algorithms for a rigorous definition of effective refraction index, with which he designed optical metamaterials with novel optical properties. As a researcher for an optical sensor company, Brian developed full-wave electromagnetic simulations, characterizations, and optimized designs of image sensors with wavelength scale features. Before starting at Tech-X, Dr. Schwartz developed design tools and full-wave simulations of CMOS-compatible silicon photonic devices for optical signal processing applications.
Scott Sides, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Scott Sides received a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from Florida State University. Dr. Sides worked at Sandia National Labs as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Gary S. Grest using molecular dynamics simulations to study polymer structure and dynamics. He then worked at the University of California at Santa Barbara as a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Glenn Fredrickson developing numerical codes to solve self-consistent, field theoretic models of block copolymer mixtures.
David N. Smithe, Ph.D. Principal Scientist
Dr. Smithe is a specialist in theoretical and computational electromagnetics and plasma physics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, in 1987, for the study of parallel gradient effects on RF heating in tokamak fusion devices. He continued this work as a post-doc in the RF modeling group at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he helped develop theory, modeling tools, and data analysis for the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) experiment.
Dr. Smithe was employed at Mission Research Corporation from 1989 to 2005, where his main focus was modeling of numerous beam, plasma, and microwave devices using electromagnetic particle-in-cell software. Dr. Smithe has extensive experience in modeling traveling wave and klystron microwave sources, including sheet beam and multiple beam klystrons. This work also included software development for the MAGIC Tool Suite commercial software product. Dr. Smithe is author or coauthor of many of its popular algorithms, including eigenmode, autogrid, and parallel computing capabilities, OpenGL geometry visualization, and many of the interactive data displays and engineering diagnostics.
Dr. Smithe's ongoing collaboration with the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory led to the METS95 software, which introduced the All-Orders solution method, for modeling of non-local plasma heating effects associated with high temperatures and high harmonic resonance. Dr. Smithe is a participant in the DOE's SciDAC RF project, where he continues to work on improving RF modeling capability for fusion plasmas, including wavelet basis methods, and time-domain approaches for modeling of non-linear effects in the plasma edge.
Andrey Sobol, Ph.D. Research Mathematician
Dr. Sobol's research focus is on numerical and analytical study of dynamical systems, high performance parallel computing, and functional analysis. During his Ph.D. thesis work, Dr. Sobol developed a parallel Vlasov code for investigating collective effects in beam-beam interactions. For the numerical simulations, he has been using parallel computers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center since 2003. A significant part of his dissertation work is dedicated to analytic analysis of the linearized Vlasov equation, and the corresponding integral equation of the 3rd kind. In his dissertation, he also performed some rigorous study of averaging methods for evolving distributions and extending classical averaging principles to function spaces.
Srinath Vadlamani, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Srinath Vadlamani received his doctorate in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2005 under the supervision of doctors James D. Meiss and Scott E. Parker. After his doctorate, Srinath joined the Plasma Science and Innovation Center at the University of Washington-Seattle, where he became the lead developer of MH4D, a resistive MH4D semi-implicit finite-volume code on an unstructured tetrahedral mesh.
Upon joining Tech-X Corporation in September 2006, he joined the NIMROD team as developer to explore interfacing new linear solvers. He also joined the Framework for Modernization and Componentization of Fusion Modules (FMCFM) project to help develop new parallel linear solvers. Dr. Srinath Vadlamani is an applied mathematician whose interest include computational plasma physics techniques, parallel
Seth Veitzer, Ph.D. Research Scientist
Dr. Veitzer received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1999 in the field of Geophysics. His dissertation research focused on the development of theories of river network branching structure using concepts from complex systems analysis and probability theory. His research interests include techniques of parallel computation, ion-matter interactions, formal language theory, complex systems, and theoretical biology.
Dr. Veitzer is an expert in a number of areas of mathematics, physics, and computer programming. He has extensive experience in the fields of probability and statistics, physics, geophysics and hydrology, and has developed extensive statistical models of physical phenomena using non-standard analysis techniques. He has specific knowledge of many computing languages and packages, such as C, Fortran, IDL, Java, Python, shell scripting and Autotools. Dr. Veitzer is currently the technical lead of the FastDL project, implementing different methods of parallelization into the IDL programming language.
Dave Wade-Stein, Ph.D. Software Developer II
Dave Wade-Stein received a B.S. and M.S in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2001. His dissertation research focused on the design, development and classroom testing of Summary Street, a web-based system which incorporates Latent Semantic Analysis to help students write better summaries by identifying missing, redundant, and irrelevant information.
Dr. Wade-Stein has over 20 years of programming experience and 13 years of teaching experience in programming, Unix system administration, operating systems theory and discrete mathematics for the Navy and the University of California at Santa Barbara. At Tech-X, he works primarily in C++, Python, Bash scripting, and Fortran, but he also has extensive experience in Perl, PHP, Java, Tcl, Ada, and Eiffel.
Nanbor Wang, Ph.D. Principal Computer Scientist
Dr. Wang has bachelor's and master's degrees in Mineral and Petroleum Engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. As part of his doctoral research, Dr. Wang developed a QoS-enabled component middleware framework called CIAO, based on the CORBA Component model (CCM). Dr. Wang's research interests focus on software architecture for supporting systemic aspects in component-based middleware systems using meta-programming techniques and aspect-oriented approaches. He is also interested in other component/object-oriented programming approaches, dynamic configuration and reconfiguration of software system, as well as modeling and synthesizing large-scale applications.
Since joining Tech-X in 2003, Dr. Wang has been involved in innovative research and development of large-scale distributed and parallel computing infrastructures and services, as well as middle technologies for supporting mission-critical systems and applications. These technologies range from fault-tolerant and real-time CORBA, through emerging Data Distribution Service (DDS), grid services and technologies, and ontologies, as well as distributed and parallel programming frameworks.
Chuandong Zhou, Ph.D. Research Assistant
Dr. Zhou has a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Dr. Zhou received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, at Rochester, New York, in 2008 in the field of Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics. During his graduate study, he worked at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics and the Fusion Science Center where he conducted research in theoretical study and numerical simulation of inertial confinement fusion and fast ignition. His doctoral dissertation is about fuel assembly for conventional, fast and shock ignition direct-drive inertial confinement fusion.
Dr. Zhou's research interests focus on theoretical modelling and numerical simulation in plasma physics and high energy density physics, including laser-plasma interactions, charged particle transport, radiation hydrodynamics and inertial confinement fusion science research. It is important to study various plasma systems by kinetic theory, magnetohydrodynamics and fluid dynamics approaches. To implement large scale parallel scientific computational solutions, he is also interested in working with different numerical methods, such as particle in cell and multidimensional hydrodynamic codes.