Ian Bell
Scientific Software Engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Bell is a scientific software engineer with 14 years of experience applying thermodynamics and thermal-systems expertise to production-grade code, currently building software at Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He is the primary developer of the CoolProp open-source thermophysical property library and a core developer on NIST REFPROP, specializing in cross-language interfaces and practical implementation of new models like refrigerant departure functions and entropy-scaling theory. Trained as a Ph.D. mechanical engineer from Purdue and seasoned by research appointments at NIST, University of Liège, and Purdue, he bridges rigorous physical modeling with robust software engineering. Based in Washington, DC, Ian is known for turning complex thermophysical theory into usable libraries that integrate into engineering workflows—an indicator of both deep domain knowledge and pragmatic developer instincts.
13 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering at Purdue UniversityBachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering, Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University
English, French, German
Github Skills (200)
testing10
perl10
cpp10
azerothcore10
api10
julia10
json10
dom10
unicode10
python-bindings10
notebook10
python10
ipython10
gtk10
tdd10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
CoolProp/simple_cmake_example
Oct 2016 - Apr 2020
Contributions:7 commits, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 3 years 7 months
CoolProp/CoolProp-museum
Mar 2014 - May 2014
Contributions:163 commits in 2 months
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