Paul Kent
Distinguished R&D Staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Kent is a Distinguished R&D Staff scientist and software engineer with 11 years postdoctoral-to-senior experience at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, applying high-performance computing to scientific codes and infrastructure. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Bath, blending deep domain science with production-grade software engineering. Paul contributes to major open-source projects such as QMCPACK—an HPC quantum Monte Carlo code with GPU support—and Spack, improving testing, HDF5 integration, and package maintenance to broaden scientific software portability. He excels at backend development for complex scientific workflows, building robust testing and packaging infrastructure that scales across platforms. Based in Knoxville, Tennessee, Paul combines long-term research perspective with hands-on code contributions that enable reproducible, high-performance science. An understated strength is his focus on testability and deployment details that quietly improve researcher productivity across large codebases.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics at University of CambridgeBachelor of Science (BSc), Applied Physics, Bachelor of Science (BSc), Applied Physics at University of Bath
Github Skills (18)
hdf10
c-language10
python10
package-management10
testing10
package-manager-tool10
code-coverage10
build-tools10
package-manager10
cprogramming-language10
scientific-computing10
autotools9
macos8
cmake8
linux8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
QMCPACK/qmcpack
Jul 2014 - Jan 2023
Main repository for QMCPACK, an open-source production level many-body ab initio Quantum Monte Carlo code for computing the electronic structure of atoms, molecules, and solids with full performance portable GPU support
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:24 releases, 1533 reviews, 2474 commits in 8 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily worked on code changes in the tests/coverage directory, specifically focusing on read_gcov.py and compare_gcov.py. The modifications involve merging branches, modifying code within test files to perform calculations using HDF5. The contributions include improvements to testing frameworks, and improvements to the testing infrastructure of the code.
quantum-monte-carlompiatomsgpu-supportc-plus-plus
spack/spack
Jul 2020 - Jan 2023
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 reviews, 23 commits, 58 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the Spack package manager by adding and updating package definitions, including version specifications and dependency configurations, for various software libraries and tools. They focused on integrating new versions of existing packages like py-sphinxcontrib-bibtex, libelf, curl, and others, and ensured the proper configuration and dependencies for these packages within the Spack environment. These contributions aimed to expand the software available via Spack, enabling users to easily install and manage a broader range of scientific computing tools and libraries.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
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.