I am a second-year graduate student in the physics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My advisor, Richard Martin, and I are part of the Materials Computation Center (MCC), an interdisciplinary center which fosters cooperative research within the area of Computational Materials Science. The personnel supported by the center also devote part of their efforts to develop computational research tools which are actively shared locally and within the world-wide community.

My interest in this interdisciplinary field started while I was an undergraduate at MIT working for the Arias group doing research on the electronic structure theory of dislocations in iron. This was followed-up with further course work at UIUC, particularly an Atomistic Simulation class instructed by Duane Johnson and David Ceperley. Our class project lead us to develop a ground state path integral monte carlo (GSPIMC) code. We are currently applying this technique to the electronic structure of molecules in an effort to compare the efficiency of this technique with conventional diffusion monte carlo (DMC).

These are research projects which are near publication. My future plans are to develop toolkits for object-oriented electronic structure calculations. I am just starting on this work which I expect to involve both the development of efficient DFT methods and the development of new functionals, e.g. the dynamical mean field theory proposed by S.Savrosov and M. Jarrell at the last March APS.

Because there are no canonical numerical libraries and minimal infrastructure for scientific data in object-oriented programming languages, we have spent substantial time developing software which is robust, portable, and efficient. In the future, we wish to minimize this time by using current and emerging software toolkits, hence allowing us to focus on doing physics. To this end, we are pursuing the answer to your inquiry, "How can ACTS work for you?"

Curriculum vita avialable at: http://w3.physics.uiuc.edu/~nromero/archive/cv.pdf