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.
9 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 (55)
sparse10
parallel10
algebra10
blas10
automatic-differentiation10
physics10
cuda10
cpp10
high-performance10
linear-algebra10
julia10
apple-silicon9
gpu9
chemistry9
tensor9
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
kmp5VT/ITensors.jl
Sep 2022 - Feb 2025
A Julia library for efficient tensor computations and tensor network calculations
Contributions:249 PRs, 1265 pushes, 368 branches in 2 years 5 months
julia-librarylinear-algebracalculationsautomatic-differentiationtensor-network
kmp5VT/ITensor
Sep 2022 - Apr 2024
A C++ library for efficient tensor network calculations
Contributions:58 pushes, 6 branches in 1 year 7 months
cppc-librarycalculationsc-plus-plustensor-network
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