Zhihao Cui is a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University with eight years of experience bridging theoretical chemistry and scientific software development. He earned a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry from Caltech and began translating deep domain expertise into open-source contributions, notably fixing bugs and adding features to the widely used PySCF quantum chemistry library. His work on intrinsic atomic orbitals, k-point sampling, and DFT+U improvements demonstrates both rigorous theoretical grounding and practical impact on computational chemistry tooling. Comfortable in back-end development and test-driven workflows, he strengthens reproducibility and numerical reliability in research codebases. Based in New York, he brings a rare combination of academic depth and hands-on engineering that accelerates both method development and community software quality.
8 years of coding experience
California Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science - BS, Materials Chemistry, Bachelor of Science - BS, Materials Chemistry at Peking University
Contributions:6 reviews, 10 commits, 13 PRs in 3 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Zhihao primarily contributed to bug fixes and enhancements within the PySCF quantum chemistry library. They addressed issues related to intrinsic atomic orbitals (IAO) and implemented functionality for k-point sampling. Additionally, the user updated and expanded tests for the IAO and IBO modules, ensuring the library's accuracy. They also made adjustments related to the DFT+U implementation and other minor fixes within the project.
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Zhihao Cui - Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University