Samuel Watkins
Physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, Washington, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolSamuel Watkins is a physicist specializing in detection physics and data-intensive analysis, currently staff in the Data Intensive Physics Team at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and a guest scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. With eight years of experience spanning a PhD from UC Berkeley through Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowship work, he has led dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay searches using narrow-gap semiconductors and high-purity Ge detectors. He combines hands-on cryogenic lab operation and instrument development with extensive Python software engineering—authoring and maintaining open-source analysis packages like QETpy, DarkLim, and detprocess—to turn raw detector traces into world-leading limits. Comfortable bridging experiment and computation, he has a track record of implementing statistical tools and high-performance computing workflows that squeeze maximal sensitivity from low-noise, near–absolute-zero measurements.
8 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Physics at University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Github Skills (33)
python10
detectors10
digital-signal-processing10
detector10
physics10
threshold9
conda9
statistics9
trigger9
data-acquisition9
scientific-computing8
python-data8
legend8
setuptools8
snakemake7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
slwatkins/covid
Apr 2020 - Oct 2021
A repo for plotting and analyzing COVID-19 cases, with a focus on the Bay Area.
Contributions:1 review, 111 commits, 166 PRs in 1 year 6 months
analyzingcasespythondata-sciencebay-area
splendor-collab/splendsp
Dec 2022 - Nov 2025
Splendid Digital Signal Processing of time series data for small physics experiments
Contributions:11 releases, 6 PRs, 19 pushes in 2 years 11 months
detectorsdigital-signal-processingdsppython
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