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.

David Alexander, Ph.D.
Deputy Vice President

Dr. David A. Alexander received a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder in 1996 for plasma physics research in the area of confinement properties of a fusion device. During his thesis research, Dr. Alexander developed numerous FORTRAN programs that automate data taking and data analysis in plasma. Continuing on at CU, he developed interactive Java applets in the academic area of planetary science for the Solar System Collaboratory Website.

Joining Tech-X Corporation in 1997, he has concentrated on the user experience including education, user interfaces, and data analysis processes. He has developed educational Java applets and has produced a commercial software package and published in this area. In addition to being an expert in developing Java graphical user interfaces, he also has extensive experience in Grid technology. For example, he has used Open Science Grid middleware to build a system for the Java Analysis Studio package developed by Dr. Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which makes it easier for the user to leverage Grid resources in high energy physics data analysis. He has also developed a system for users to easily construct data analysis work flows within the software framework used by the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Finally, he has been a major author and architect in many projects involving client-server middle layers such as RMI, CORBA, and Web Services and rich clients such as Java applications, Web page coding, and browser scripting.

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.
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".

Selma O. Cetiner, Ph.D.
Research Associate

Selma received her BSc in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. In 2005 she obtained a doctorate from Imperial College, London. Her doctoral research included studying the properties of the sheath found at the divertor targets in a tokamak by developing a particle-in-cell code.

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.

Douglas R. Dechow, Ph.D.
Computer Scientist

Doug Dechow received his doctorate in computer science in 2005 from Oregon State University. Dr. Dechow is currently collaborating with researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on the Synergia beam dynamics framework.

His research interests are in advanced separation of concerns techniques. In particular, Dr. Dechow is investigating the newly emerging paradigm of aspect-oriented programming. Dr. Dechow is an organizer for the 2005 Generative Programming & Component Engineering Young Researcher's Workshop.

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.

David Fillmore, Ph.D.
Research Associate

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.
Software Developer II

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.

Mark L. Green, Ph.D.
Computer Scientist

Dr. Green received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering (1986), M.S. in Water Resources and Hydraulics (1995), and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering (2000) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Green completed his post-doctoral research at the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the Center for Computational Research SUNY Buffalo developing Portal/Gateway user interfaces, data and computational grid middleware, and cyberinfrastructure. Dr. Green has also worked for the New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, Center for Computational Research, as Head of Cyberinfrastructure and Grid Computational Scientist, acting as lead architect and developer of the grid computing group.

Dr. Green is an expert in the design, conceptualization, and production of computational and data grid applications, dashboards, visualization, monitoring and analysis tools, and grid Portals/Gateways. Some of Dr. Green' recent work involved the development and implementation of Grid-enabling Application Templates (GATs) for scientific and engineering application grid Portals/Gateways. This cyberinfrastructure specialized in the integration and deployment of user community applications and the consolidation of complex, heterogeneous and homogeneous environments into large-scale coordinated grid-enabled compute and storage element resources. He has also spent a significant portion of his career developing and optimizing large-scale high-performance distributed and parallel processing applications involving process models, analysis models, visualization and geographic information systems. Dr. Green joined the Tech-X Corporation Distributed Technologies group in 2006.

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.

Paul Hamill, M.S.
Software Developer II

Mr. Hamill received a B.S. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University, followed by a M.S. in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in software from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His Master's thesis topic was "Internet Structure Visualization". He has almost twenty years of experience as a software developer, including work on academic research projects, large-scale commercial software, Internet applications, entrepreneurial startup efforts, satellite and remote sensing systems, and classified defense programs. Past employers include IBM, Lockheed Martin, MTV/Viacom, Ereo/iBelay, and Quark. He has extensive international experience, including work with partners in Germany, South Africa, India, and Kuwait.

Mr. Hamill is a recognized expert on Test-Driven Development (TDD), a key element of Agile development. His book "Unit Test Frameworks" was published by O'Reilly Media in November 2004. He has authored or co-authored several academic and commercial papers and articles. His research interests include advanced graphics and GUIs, Grid computing, and Agile development processes.

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.

Scott Kruger, Ph.D.
Deputy Vice President

Scott Kruger received his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999 under the supervision of Drs. J. D. Callen and C. C. Hegna. After his doctorate, he joined Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to work on computational magnetohydrodynamics, specializing in applications of massively-parallel initial-value simulation of tokamak plasmas at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility. He joined Tech-X Corporation in 2004. As a lead developer of the NIMROD code, Dr. Kruger has extensive experience in software design and development.

John Loverich, Ph.D.
Computational Research Scientist

John has a PhD 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.
Computational 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.

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.

Serguei Ovtchinnikov, Ph.D.
Research Scientist

Serguei received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His main research interests are in domain decomposition methods for scientific computing. He specializes in numerical solutions of nonlinear, time-dependent problems in mathematical physics using massively parallel computing environments.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

Nathaniel D. Sizemore, B.S.
Software Developer I

Mr. Sizemore received his B.S. in Computer Science from Westminster College, where he also had concentrations in physics and mathematics. Before coming to Tech-X he participated in research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Fusion Energy Division, developing serial and parallel simulations to investigate self-organized criticalities in fusion plasmas and packet-based communications networks.

At Tech-X Corporation, Mr. Sizemore lends both his technical skills and liberal arts background to a variety of projects through technical writing, cross-platform development and release engineering, software testing, and Web development.

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.

Stephen Tramer, M.S.
Software Developer I

Stephen Tramer received a concurrent M.A. in Mathematics and B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy in 2006 from the University of Colorado. He has worked primarily on distributed application systems, including load balancing and message priority processing. His research interests include artificial intelligence, graph theory, and algebraic number theory.

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 a bachelors and masters degree in Mineral and Petroleum Engineering from National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. While working for his doctoral degree, Dr. Wang worked as a research associate at the Center of Distributed Object Computing where he conducted research and development work on 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, and model and synthesizing of large-scale applications. Dr. Wang's work currently focuses on CORBA and grid middleware development environment for enabling remote visualization, distributed scientific data analysis systems, data and work flow management for large-scale scientific applications.

Matthew T. Wrobel
Research Assistant

Mr. Wrobel received Bachelors in Physics, and a Bachelors in Computer Science from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has basic experience in Numerical Analysis and Scientific computing. Over the summer of 2006 he worked at the PSI Center in Washington to develop a Python data interpolating/resampling to aid 3-d visualization, using VisIt.

He currently is working on another Python utility to help with the building and management of large diverse projects. He also supports projects doing work ranging C/C++ numerical algorithms, to file parsers and user interfaces.

 

Wenming Ye, M.S.
Software Developer II

Mr. Ye received his undergraduate degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For his undergraduate thesis, Wenming researched and developed a Java version of simulation authoring tool, Agentsheets. Agentsheets allows an inexperienced to create realistic simulations of complex behaviors through scriptable agents.

Mr. Ye pursued graduate study at Center for Life Long Learning and Design at University of Colorado. There, he worked closely with SRI International on the ESCOT project team as a developer of component-based educational software. After completing his graduate work, Mr. Ye joined the Center for Technology in Learning at SRI International where he focused on the educationally focused design and development of tools for wireless, handheld, and Web simulation tools.

Mr. Ye is currently a developer on the productization team at Tech-X Corp. His responsibilities includes multi-platform GUI development and cross-platform deployment of commercial software.