Ryan Elliott
Professor at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Elliott is a Professor of Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics at the University of Minnesota with over 11 years of experience bridging academic research and open-source software development. He leads the OpenKIM project and is the principal developer of the kim-api, contributing core integrations for widely used molecular dynamics tools such as LAMMPS and maintaining package support in Spack. His background in aerospace engineering, scientific computing, and applied mathematics (PhD/MS, University of Michigan) informs rigorous, reproducible simulation workflows and tooling. Known for practical automation and build engineering, he focuses on making advanced interatomic models accessible and portable across platforms—an often underappreciated but critical contributor to computational materials science infrastructure.
11 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering & Scientific Computing, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Aerospace Engineering & Scientific Computing at University of MichiganBachelor's degree, Engineering Mechanics, Bachelor's degree, Engineering Mechanics at Michigan State University
Github Skills (14)
cmake10
api10
molecular-dynamics-simulation10
spack10
package-management10
apidoc10
nonlinear-dynamics10
molecular-simulation10
python10
cprogramming-language9
build-tools9
c-language9
hpc8
scientific-computing8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
lammps/lammps
Jun 2017 - Dec 2021
Public development project of the LAMMPS MD software package
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 reviews, 149 commits, 41 PRs in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ryan's contributions center around the development and maintenance of the KIM API interface within the LAMMPS molecular dynamics software. They focused on creating and refining an installation tool (install.py) to streamline the setup of the KIM-API library and its models for use with LAMMPS. The commits demonstrate work to enable the KIM API to be used for various kinds of models. Further work was done to refine the tool to work with different systems and make them compatible for use in the software.
lammpsmolecular-dynamicssimulationkokkos
spack/spack
Mar 2019 - Feb 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:3 reviews, 9 commits, 11 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to updating package definitions within the Spack package manager, focusing on the kim-api and openkim-models packages. Their work involved updating versions, adapting to API changes, and adding dependencies for these packages. They also added and updated package definitions related to molecular simulations, ensuring the correct build arguments and dependencies. The user's changes included modifying the `package.py` files, indicating they were managing build configurations and dependencies.
compilerpackage-managerpythonspackhpc
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