Karl Pierce
Postdoctoral Fellow at Simons Foundation
Blacksburg, Virginia, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarl Pierce is a postdoctoral fellow and computational scientist with nine years of experience developing scalable electronic-structure methods and massively parallel algorithms for supercomputers. He has blended hands-on laboratory work—growing novel metallic crystals and building testing apparatus—with advanced software development in C++, contributing to packages like MPQC, ITensor, ITensorCPD and MPQC. His recent work applies unsupervised machine learning to cut the computational cost of electronic structure theory, accelerating the bridge between new mathematics and applications in chemistry and physics. At Virginia Tech and the Simons Foundation he has designed parallel, heterogeneous implementations and optimized tensor algebra kernels for large-scale simulations. Karl’s skill set spans experiment, theory, and high-performance code, and he demonstrably moves ideas from bench to HPC-ready software. Based in Blacksburg, VA, he focuses on reducing the lag between mathematical innovation and practical computational modeling.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemical Physics, Bachelor of Science (BS), Chemical Physics at Rice UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Theoretical Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Theoretical Chemistry at Virginia Tech Graduate School
Github Skills (29)
physics10
cpp10
julia10
gpu9
chemistry9
tensor9
cuda9
gaussian8
portability8
cpu8
apple-silicon8
mechanics7
homebrew6
ruby6
scientific-computing5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
kmp5VT/BlockSparseGPUTests
Apr 2024 - Oct 2025
A small script to construct and time realistic DMRG calculations on different backends
Contributions:4 PRs, 54 pushes, 5 branches in 1 year 6 months
kmp5VT/kmp5VT.github.io
Sep 2021 - Jul 2025
Contributions:37 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 10 months
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