David Dotson
Principal, Consultant at datryllic
Denver, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDavid Dotson is a principal consultant and computational scientist with 12+ years building robust, production-ready software for science and engineering, specializing in simulations, data processing, and automation across health, biomaterials, and space technologies. He combines daily Python development and deep Linux sysadmin experience (10+ years) to deliver pragmatic systems engineered to be "as simple as possible—but no simpler." An active open-source contributor, he has improved high-profile projects like MDAnalysis (faster random access of large trajectory files) and the xonsh shell, focusing on backend reliability and test automation. His background spans research and applied roles—from PhD-level computational biophysics to DevOps in medical AI—giving him rare fluency in both scientific modeling and operational software. Colleagues rely on him to turn complex, long-running workflows into maintainable, automatable systems that scale in real-world environments.
12 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. Physics, Ph.D. Physics at Arizona State UniversityBachelor of Science Physics, Bachelor of Science Physics at Missouri University of Science and Technology
English, German, Japanese
Github Skills (22)
python10
fireworks10
molecular-simulation10
testing10
analyse10
computational-chemistry10
mdanalysis10
molecular-dynamics-simulation10
fileio10
nonlinear-dynamics10
command-line10
file-handling10
file-processing10
xonsh10
file-transfer10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
MDAnalysis/mdanalysis
Jan 2015 - Jan 2017
MDAnalysis is a Python library to analyze molecular dynamics simulations.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:121 commits, 33 PRs, 111 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:David focused on improving the MDAnalysis library by implementing features related to persistent offsets for XTC and TRR trajectory files, enabling faster loading of large files. They added functionality to store offset information to disk and load it for quick random access. The user also added error handling and moved tests for the offset functionality into their own test classes, ensuring they were more isolated and smaller, improving test efficiency. Furthermore, they added and modified tests to verify the changes and ensure that frame numbering and related calculations worked as expected.
molecular-dynamics-simulationmolecular-dynamics-simulationspython-librarypythonscience
xonsh/xonsh
Jul 2018 - Aug 2020
:shell: Python-powered shell. Full-featured and cross-platform.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 commits, 5 PRs, 15 pushes in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:David primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the core functionality of the xonsh shell. Their contributions involved moving and consolidating monkey-patched built-ins, leading to cleaner code organization. They also made changes related to the initialization of the XonshSession instance and adjustments to the built-in loading and unloading processes. This indicates a focus on improving the shell's internal structure and maintainability.
unixiterm2pythonsystem-administrationxonsh
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