Consultants

To address the need for high-level expertise, the center hosts computational consultants to advise students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty and to instruct mini-courses in computer simulation and modeling.

Dr. Richard Christie, Chief Consultant

Richard Christie received his PhD under the supervision of Ken Jordan, University of Pittsburgh.  His PhD research dealt with the spectroscopy and the thermodynamics of hydrogen-bonded clusters.  Richard has developed several portable and efficient parallel programs to aid in these studies.  His current research interest centers on use of the Quantum Monte Carlo to obtain highly accurate interaction energies between molecules.  Richard is the Technical Director of the Center for Molecular and Materials Simulation (CMMS), whose computational resources are available to researchers in the Center for Simulation and Modeling.

Dr. Kim F. Wong

Kim F. Wong received his PhD with Peter Rossky at the University of Texas, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State (with Sharon Hammes-Schiffer) and the University of Utah (with Greg Voth).  His scientific interests are in the development and implementation of new methodologies for describing condensed phase phenomena relevant to chemical, biological, materials and energy applications, including proton and electron transfer in solution, biological and material systems, molecular solar cells and LEDs, and biomimetic materials for fuel cell utilization and H2 production.  Kim is especially interested in computational approaches for bridging time and length scales.

Dr. Server Levent Yilmaz

Levent received his PhD from the University Pittsburgh, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science. His research interests are in the areas of thermo-fluid science, turbulence, combustion, computational methods and numerical algorithms for PDEs and large scale systems, applied mathematics, stochastic processes, Monte Carlo methods and molecular simulation. He has expertise in high-performance computing, parallel algorithms and libraries (MPI, Zoltan, PetSC, ...), scientific code development (in C/C++/Fortran) and open source development frameworks.

Dr. Akila Gothandaraman

Akila Gothandaraman earned her PhD in Computer Engineering and a minor degree in Computational Science under the supervision of Gregory Peterson, University of Tennessee.  During her involvement in the National Science Foundation'sCyberChem collaborative project at Tennessee, she was also supervised by Robert Hinde and Robert Harrison, Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee.  Her PhD research dealt with exploring the viability of emerging architectures such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and graphics processing units (GPUs) for a Quantum Monte Carlo application.  Her research interests include high-performance computing, and the use of the special-purpose computing architectures.  She is interested in working with multidisciplinary teams to explore the use of emerging architectures for scientific applications.

Email them at: samhelp@pitt.edu