Daniel Merthe
Senior R&D Engineer at Helion
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDaniel Merthe is a Senior R&D Engineer with eight years of hands-on experience translating advanced plasma, vacuum and condensed-matter physics into working energy devices. He has led experimental programs from concept to prototype—improving ion confinement and density by two orders of magnitude at Avalanche Energy and building thermionic converters and UHV test platforms at Modern Electron—while also developing instrumentation‑control software and custom vacuum hardware. Now at Helion in Seattle, he focuses on bringing green energy concepts toward deployment, combining expertise in spectroscopy, optics and molecular physics with practical skills in machining, welding and vacuum system fabrication. Daniel’s background blends deep academic training (PhD in Physics) with national-lab experience in precision metrology and laser spectroscopy, enabling rigorous diagnostics-driven development. Notably, he discovered an ion-loading resonance that achieved up to 20% of space-charge-limited density in an electrostatic trap—an uncommon experimental milestone that illustrates his knack for unconventional, high-impact solutions.
8 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Physics at University of Southern CaliforniaBachelor of Science, Physics, Chemistry, Bachelor of Science, Physics, Chemistry at University of San Francisco
Spanish, English
Github Skills (1)
automation7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (4)
dmerthe/empyric
May 2020 - Jan 2023
Automated Experiment Management
Contributions:6 reviews, 567 commits, 93 PRs in 2 years 9 months
automationexperiment-management
dmerthe/electromagpy
Jan 2023 - Jun 2025
Contributions:19 pushes, 5 branches in 2 years 5 months
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.