Sterling Harper
Principal Engineer, Core Thermal Hydraulics Analysis at TerraPower
Greater Seattle Area United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSterling Harper is a Principal Engineer specializing in core thermal-hydraulics and neutronics software for nuclear modeling, with 13 years of experience spanning national labs, academia, and industry. He holds a PhD from MIT in Nuclear Science and Engineering and has driven development of production-grade simulation tools, including contributions to the widely used OpenMC Monte Carlo code and the MOOSE multiphysics framework. At TerraPower he advances reactor thermal-hydraulics methods, bringing together CFD-informed models, turbulence closures, and boundary-condition innovations to improve predictive capability. Sterlin g’s background blends rigorous research—developing temperature-feedback methods and test suites—with pragmatic engineering, such as improving code clarity, type-checking, and example-driven documentation in open-source projects. Notably, his work often bridges deep physics insight and software engineering practices to make complex reactor simulations more maintainable and reproducible.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Nuclear Science and Engineer, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Nuclear Science and Engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (14)
na10
finite-element-analysis10
c-language10
el10
f10
cprogramming-language10
nav10
equation10
python10
documentation9
multiphysics9
simulations9
simulation9
web-framework9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
openmc-dev/openmc
Jun 2013 - Apr 2021
OpenMC Monte Carlo Code
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:9 reviews, 1019 commits, 289 PRs in 7 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Sterling primarily focused on updating and maintaining example scripts within the repository, indicating a role in backend development or documentation. The edits involved improvements to code examples, including updating documentation and improving type-checking. These changes suggest a focus on improving code clarity and maintainability.
computational-physicsnuclear-energyopenmcnuclear-fusionnuclear-engineering
idaholab/moose
Jun 2015 - Mar 2021
Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:31 reviews, 92 commits, 35 PRs in 5 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Sterling primarily focused on enhancing the MOOSE framework by adding new features and improving existing ones. Their contributions include adding a rate parameter to the `Reaction` and `FVReaction` kernels, which likely improves simulation capabilities. They also introduced new boundary conditions, such as `FVDirichletBCBase` and related classes, which is key for finite volume simulations. Further work included adding a Reynolds stress mixing length model and turbulent scalar diffusion, demonstrating an understanding of computational fluid dynamics.
pythonfinite-element-analysisfemparallelmultiphysics
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