William Dawn
Computational Scientist
Idaho Falls, Idaho, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWilliam Dawn is a Senior Nuclear Engineer and lead developer of Peacock, a continuous-energy Monte Carlo code built to NQA-1 quality assurance standards, with a decade of experience in reactor physics and computational neutron transport. He combines deep academic credentials (PhD/MS/BS in Nuclear Engineering from NC State) with hands-on national-lab and industry work across INL, ORNL, CASL, and Studsvik Scandpower, tackling fast reactor modeling, cross-section generation, and full-scale simulation. A practiced software engineer, he contributes to high-profile open-source projects like MFEM—fixing memory leaks in SLEPc, enhancing DG integrators, and improving VTK readers—demonstrating attention to low-level stability and numerical methods. Licensed reactor operator experience and multiple patented contributions from GE Hitachi underline his practical systems understanding and safety mindset. Colleagues benefit from his rare mix of rigorous research, production-grade code development, and regulatory-quality engineering.
10 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Nuclear Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State UniversityHigh School, Commonwealth Governor's School, High School, Commonwealth Governor's School at North Stafford High School
Github Skills (10)
el10
c-language10
f10
cprogramming-language10
computational-science10
scientific-computing9
accelerated-computing9
parallel-computing9
high-performance9
cluster-computing9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
mfem/mfem
Jul 2020 - Jun 2021
Lightweight, general, scalable C++ library for finite element methods
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:18 reviews, 46 commits, 14 PRs in 10 months
Contributions summary:William primarily addressed memory leaks and other issues within the SLEPc eigen solver, a key component of the MFEM library. Their contributions involved fixing leaks in the destructor, simplifying vector deletion, and correcting potential double-deletions, thereby enhancing the stability and reliability of the code. They also added documentation for a DGTraceIntegrator and support for non-scalar coefficients, which suggests an understanding of the finite element methods and their integration. Finally, the user made a small change to the VTK reader.
cppfinite-elementshigh-orderhigh-performance-computingparallel-computing
wcdawn/WilliamDawn_RESUME
Jan 2019 - Sep 2023
Contributions:28 pushes in 4 years 8 months
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