Sebastian Ehlert - Senior Researcher at Microsoft

Sebastian Ehlert

Senior Researcher at Microsoft

Germany

Join Prog.AI to see contacts

Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Sebastian Ehlert is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research AI for Science with nine years of experience advancing density functional theory using deep learning and high-accuracy quantum chemistry methods. He leads development of the Skala functional to enable data-driven, systematically improvable exchange-correlation models and drives the Microsoft Research Accurate Chemistry Collection (MSR-ACC) to provide chemical-accuracy training data at scale. Sebastian blends rigorous theoretical chemistry (Dr. rerum naturalium, summa cum laude) with hands-on software engineering, contributing to and maintaining major open-source scientific projects and packaging over a hundred conda-forge packages to make research software broadly accessible. His code contributions span Fortran, C++ and Python—improving Fortran tooling (fpm, stdlib), the semiempirical xtb package, and scientific packaging in Spack—highlighting a rare mix of legacy-language expertise and modern ML-driven workflows. He is particularly focused on reproducibility and scalable datasets, and often tackles low-level performance and precision issues that many researchers overlook. Based in Germany, he combines deep domain knowledge with practical engineering to push computational chemistry toward production-ready, data-driven methods.

9 years of coding experience

5 years of employment as a software developer

Doctor rerum naturalium, Chemistry, Summa cum laude, Doctor rerum naturalium, Chemistry, Summa cum laude at The University of Bonn

German, English, Persian, Chinese

Github Skills (34)

develop10

back-end-development10

package-management10

apidoc10

testing10

fortran10

toml10

api10

numerical-methods10

test-automation10

mson9

unit-testing9

c-programming9

build-system9

computational-chemistry9

Programming languages (20)

C++CSSCRustCMakeTeXGoHTML

Github contributions (5)

grimme-lab/xtb

Sep 2019 - Nov 2022

Semiempirical Extended Tight-Binding Program Package

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer

Contributions:15 releases, 170 reviews, 259 commits in 3 years 2 months

Contributions summary:Sebastian contributed significantly to the development of the `xtb` semiempirical extended tight-binding program package, particularly focusing on adding missing assets like LGPL headers to the `mctc/` directory, updating the README for installation instructions, and incorporating new Python scripts. The user also refactored the GBSA module, improved API functionality, and implemented the C-API test. Furthermore, the user addressed various bug fixes related to initialization/allocation order, ensuring the codebase's stability and performance.

extendedatomistic-simulationsquantum-chemistryforce-fieldtight-binding

fortran-lang/fpm

Sep 2020 - Dec 2022

Fortran Package Manager (fpm)

Role in this project:

Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer

Contributions:3 releases, 327 reviews, 214 commits in 2 years 3 months

Contributions summary:Sebastian primarily focused on implementing features for the Fortran Package Manager (fpm), specifically concerning the integration with TOML-Fortran and handling package manifests. They added support for external dependencies and linking against external libraries, enabling the use of external tools. The user also contributed to the test suite, by adding new unit tests and improved test coverage. Furthermore, they made changes to build and CI configuration.

fortran-package-managerpackage-managerfortranfpmbuild-system

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.

Request Free Trial