Background
My training is as a physicist with a BSc in Physics and Math from UFV and a PhD in physics from UBC. Currently, I'm self-employed as a research computing consultant under the banner Grey Haven Solutions. Before this, I was employed at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Düsseldorf, where I lead the modelling group "Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Defects". Most of my career has been spent as a computational materials scientist, giving me lots of experience with modelling and simulation, and developing custom research software (usually in python).
Software
I am a core developer for the pyiron project -- an open-source integrated development environment (IDE) for computational materials science. In my capacity at Grey Haven Solutions, I continue in this role, with a special emphasis on developing ironflow -- a Jupyter-based GUI that provides a graph-and-node based interface to running pyiron simulations. You can see my various development activities on GitHub.
Machine Learning
I began to explore data science and machine learning during my doctoral studies, mostly by competing in public competitions hosted by Kaggle. Since then, I've had the chance to translate these skills into my professional life a couple of times, e.g. in this publication, which was the first work in an increasingly popular subfield where we use machine-learned surrogate models (in my case gradient boosted decision trees) to predict the interaction energy between solute atoms and structural defects in metals, based on local geometric features.
Research
As a computational materials scientist, my work sat at the interface of physics, engineering, and computer science, and I have peer-reviewed articles in all these fields. In particular, my focus has been on using atomic-scale simulations to look at the interplay between chemistry (i.e. alloying elements) and defects in the crystal lattice for lightweight metallic systems, and on developing new simulation approaches and models for these sorts of investigations.
You can hear a short pop-science description of one of my past projects in this video:
Personal
My wife and I have two wonderful children who joyfully fill most of my non-work hours at the moment. So when I'm not writing code I'm usually hanging out with them and building dinosaurs from Duplo or supervising "will it chomp?" being played with whatever can be found on the floor and shoved into a tiny mouth.
Rain or shine, I like to throw the kids in the jogging stroller, put on a podcast (usually economics, history, or Critical Role) and get out for a long run. When I have the chance I like to take bigger outdoor adventures, and the banner picture above is from a canoe trip on Stave Lake near my hometown in British Columbia. I also enjoy electric bass and have played in casual funk and rock bands, provided some softer grooves at church on a Sunday morning, and lately am just in front of my computer practicing Cake and Earth Wind & Fire tracks on Rocksmith.
If I have some free time on a weeknight evening I enjoy board and video games, especially strategy/4X games. I've also been interested in the design side of games my entire life; Most of my hobby projects over the years have been physical rather than digital, but you can check out a small racing game I put together for the first game jam hosted by ExtraCredits.