Nick Hockings
Researcher at Self-employed
Dresden, Saxony, France
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Hockings is a veterinary surgeon turned cognitive roboticist with a decade of experience bridging anatomy, soft-matter modeling, and visual-tactile perception for robotics. His research spans structured soft matter, synthetic composite emulation, and application of anatomical principles to robotic design, with work published during PhD and postdoc tenures at University of Bath, CSIRO Data61, and Vetmeduni Vienna. Practically minded, he contributes to high-performance scientific software—improving build systems for Spack and performance/portability in the picongpu particle-in-cell code—demonstrating fluency in hardware-aware engineering. He combines clinical insight from veterinary training with rigorous robotics and computer-vision methods to tackle perception and material emulation problems. Based in Dresden, his profile reflects a rare interdisciplinary mix that enables translating biological structure into functional robotic materials and sensing systems.
10 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
GordonstounAberlourUniversity of PretoriaMaster of Science (MSc), Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems, Master of Science (MSc), Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems at University of SussexDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Robotics, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Robotics at University of Bath
Stackoverflow
19reputation
5kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (26)
c-language10
gpgpu10
package-management10
cmake10
openmp10
gpu10
performance-optimization10
openacc10
accelerated-computing10
cuda10
build-tools10
cprogramming-language10
particle9
python9
hpc9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
ComputationalRadiationPhysics/picongpu
Aug 2017 - Nov 2022
Performance-Portable Particle-in-Cell Simulations for the Exascale Era :sparkles:
Role in this project:
Backend Developer & Performance Engineer
Backend Developer & Performance EngineerContributions:31 reviews, 22 commits, 20 PRs in 5 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Nick primarily contributed to the performance and maintainability of the `picongpu` project. Their work involved fixing code inconsistencies, addressing compiler warnings related to variadic arguments, and optimizing the code for different hardware backends like OpenMP and OpenACC. They added features to improve performance, such as adding a `GetNumWorkers` function, and adjusted existing code to work with various compilers and hardware configurations.
exascalelaserplasmaphysicsgpu
spack/spack
Jan 2018 - Jul 2021
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:5 commits, 7 PRs, 7 comments in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nick's contributions primarily revolve around maintaining and updating build configurations for the Spack package manager. They added dependencies, fixed build targets, and modified build scripts to ensure compatibility and proper installation of packages like libharu, opencv, nccl, and magma. Additionally, the user updated package definitions for new CUDA versions, indicating a focus on integrating and automating build processes for scientific computing software and hardware dependencies.
compilerpackage-managerpythonspackhpc
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