Lori Burns
Postdoc at Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolLori Burns is a postdoctoral researcher and engineer with 14 years of experience at the intersection of computational chemistry and high-performance software development. Based at Georgia Tech, she combines a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Yale with hands-on backend and build-system expertise, contributing performance improvements to the Psi4 electronic-structure code and authoring educational psi4numpy tutorials. Lori has a strong track record in build and release automation—working on conda-forge staged-recipes and pybind11 to resolve cross-compiler issues, tighten CMake integration, and harden CI/test suites. Her work reflects both deep domain knowledge (DFT and wavefunction methods) and practical engineering that makes scientific code reproducible and portable across platforms. Notably, she bridges technical writing and engineering, turning complex quantum-chemistry concepts into accessible Jupyter notebooks while also tuning low-level performance and build flags for production-grade software.
14 years of coding experience
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Chemistry, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Chemistry at Rice UniversityDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physical Chemistry, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physical Chemistry at Yale University
Github Skills (23)
conda-forge10
c-language10
python10
user-manual10
bash10
build-system10
cmake10
computational-chemistry10
numpy10
binding10
script10
performance-optimization10
build-automation10
cprogramming-language10
linear-algebra10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
psi4/psi4
Oct 2011 - Jan 2023
Open-Source Quantum Chemistry – an electronic structure package in C++ driven by Python
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Performance Engineer
Back-end Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:18 releases, 1117 reviews, 2947 commits in 11 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Lori contributed to the electronic structure package by implementing changes to the core code for the Double Hybrid (DH) functional for improved accuracy. The contributions focused on the "dft tensor memory" and "orbital energies" for a high performance DFT code base. They were also working with performance testing.
physicschemistrypythonquantum-computingelectronic-structure
psi4/psi4numpy
Feb 2017 - Jun 2020
Combining Psi4 and Numpy for education and development.
Role in this project:Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:6 reviews, 57 commits, 29 PRs in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Lori primarily contributed to the repository by creating and updating tutorials. The commits demonstrate the addition and modification of content within Jupyter Notebooks, focusing on explaining concepts related to basis sets, wavefunctions, and other fundamental topics in computational chemistry. These tutorials use the Psi4 and NumPy libraries.
pythonnumpypsipsi4scipy
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.