Jacob Merson
Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
City of Troy, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJacob Merson is an Assistant Professor and computational engineer with 11 years of experience bridging academic research and reproducible software engineering in mechanical and computational science. Trained at Rensselaer (BS, PhD) and advanced through postdoctoral work to a faculty role, he specializes in finite element modeling, experimental mechanics, and developing automation for build and release workflows. His open-source contributions to the widely used Spack package manager—adding and maintaining package definitions and creating new packages like ccls—reflect a practical focus on making scientific software easier to build and share. Jacob’s background includes hands-on experimental design at Los Alamos and micromachining and biomedical device work, demonstrating a rare combination of lab-scale experimentation and infrastructure-level tooling. Based in Troy, NY, he brings an academic rigor to software automation and reproducible computational research.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computational Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Computational Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
140reputation
2kreached
5answers
3questions
Github Skills (12)
package-manager10
python10
package-management10
build-tools9
version-control9
cmake9
scientific-computing8
build-automation7
linux7
mpi6
exceptions6
constructor6
Programming languages (15)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
Apr 2020 - Jun 2022
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:4 reviews, 5 commits, 6 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jacob primarily contributed to the spack package manager by adding and updating package definitions. This involved modifying package.py files to include new versions of software packages (like `spdlog` and `model-traits`) and updating build configurations. Additionally, they were responsible for creating a new package for `ccls`. The changes indicate a focus on maintaining and expanding the available software packages within the spack ecosystem.
compilerpackage-managerpythonspackhpc
LACES-LAB/laces-lab.github.io
Aug 2023 - Mar 2026
Contributions:1 review, 13 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 7 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.