Kirk Pearce
Senior Software Applications Specialist
Greater Boston United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKirk Pearce is a Senior Software Applications Specialist with a PhD in theoretical chemistry and a decade of experience building and supporting enterprise scientific software for drug discovery. He blends full-stack and backend development skills with solutions architecture and customer success leadership, consistently helping scientific teams extract maximum value from complex tools. Kirk has contributed to prominent open-source quantum chemistry projects like Psi4 and psi4numpy, implementing integral derivative calculations and MP2 gradients while adding tests and performance optimizations. Based in Greater Boston, he excels at translating dense computational chemistry concepts for both specialists and non-specialists, and his career shows a rare mix of hands-on C++/Python coding and high-touch customer advocacy. An understated strength is his track record of forging lasting customer relationships while shipping scientifically rigorous, production-ready code.
10 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Virginia TechBachelor’s Degree, Chemistry/Physics, Bachelor’s Degree, Chemistry/Physics at Greenville College
English
Github Skills (9)
mpeg10
quantum-chemistry10
c-language10
p210
computational-chemistry10
cprogramming-language10
python10
numpy10
testing10
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
psi4/psi4numpy
Jan 2018 - May 2022
Combining Psi4 and Numpy for education and development.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 71 commits, 8 PRs in 4 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Kirk primarily worked on developing and maintaining computational chemistry code, specifically focusing on the implementation of MP2 (Møller–Plesset perturbation theory) gradients and the creation of a VCD (Vibrational Circular Dichroism) simulator. Their contributions involved modifying and extending existing modules for molecular calculations and integrating code from other resources. They also made various improvements to the code by implementing optimizations and performing unit testing.
pythonnumpypsipsi4scipy
psi4/psi4
Nov 2016 - Jun 2020
Open-Source Quantum Chemistry – an electronic structure package in C++ driven by Python
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 5 PRs, 20 comments in 3 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Kirk primarily contributed to the implementation of integral derivative calculations, specifically for electric dipole moments and overlap integrals within the Psi4 quantum chemistry package. Their work involved adding new functions, modifying existing ones, and integrating derivative calculations into the existing codebase. The user also added tests to verify the correctness of the implemented derivative calculations. They worked extensively with C++ and the libmints library within the Psi4 project.
physicschemistrypythonquantum-computingelectronic-structure
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.