Omar Valsson
Assistant Professor at University of North Texas
Texas, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolOmar Valsson is an Assistant Professor in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry with 11 years of experience developing classical and quantum molecular simulation methods for chemical, biological, and soft matter systems. He leads a research group at the University of North Texas focused on novel enhanced sampling techniques that expose long-timescale phenomena normally inaccessible to conventional simulations. Previously he led a group at the Max Planck Institute and trained in Michele Parrinello’s group at ETH Zurich, bringing deep expertise in metadynamics and free-energy methods. An active open-source contributor to PLUMED2, he has refined metadynamics implementations—adding smoother bias updates and instantaneous gradient monitoring—to expand practical usability. Trained as a physicist (PhD, University of Twente) with a background in excited-state quantum chemistry, he combines theoretical rigor with pragmatic software development to push simulation capabilities.
11 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
P.hD., Computational physics/chemistry, P.hD., Computational physics/chemistry at University of TwenteM.Sc., Physics, M.Sc., Physics at University of Iceland
Github Skills (6)
computational-physics10
c-language10
molecular-dynamics-simulation10
cprogramming-language10
molecular-simulation10
nonlinear-dynamics10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
plumed/plumed2
Sep 2014 - Jul 2022
Development version of plumed 2
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:210 commits, 44 PRs, 89 comments in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Omar primarily focused on enhancing the functionality of the code, specifically related to metadynamics simulations within the PLUMED2 library. They added features to control how often the reweighting factor is updated, including the option to deposit a specific number of Gaussian hills. They also introduced an alternative equation to calculate c(t) for smoother results and added the option to monitor the instantaneous gradient of the coefficents. These changes indicate a focus on refining and expanding the capabilities of the metadynamics implementation.
minecraftmolecular-dynamicsc-plus-plusfree-energyplugin
valsson-group/valsson-group.github.io
Sep 2022 - Apr 2025
Contributions:219 pushes in 2 years 7 months
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