Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab
Project: Socioeconomics of Power Outages and Heatwaves
Where did you grow up?
I was born in upstate New York, did most of my growing up in south western Ohio, but I’ve spent most of my life in east Tennessee.
What’s your field of study and how did you get into that field?
My degrees are in physical chemistry and computational astrophysics. I studied how stars and stellar explosions make the elements that compose our world. I got into it because one of the groups that developed the nuclear reaction rates for the computational stellar burning models was at Oak Ridge National Lab and I was studying at the nearby University of Tennessee. The reason that I sought out that general field of research is due to being inspired by programs like Cosmos and Star Trek. Also my father taught Fortran classes using a textbook called Fortran for Humans, a title that I thought was extremely amusing when I was a kid. The stellar nuclear reaction networks for the computational models are written in Fortran, so studying them felt like going home.
What fascinates you about HPC?
HPC fascinates me because you can make a computational model of any part of nature that you can describe with math and constrain with physics. Today’s HPC computers have so much power that the models do an excellent job of describing nature.
What’s your current title and what do you do?
My current title is HPC engineer. I help researchers use supercomputers to model nature.
What energy justice topic is most important to you and why?
I find challenges that deal with equitable distribution of resources to be interesting to model on computers because a computer allows you to visualize and study more of the problem at once.