Zihan Valmianski
Principal Engineer, Hardware Development Engineering at Western Digital
San Diego, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolZihan Valmianski is a Principal Engineer in Hardware Development with 11 years of experience integrating materials science, microfabrication, and process engineering to deliver production-ready semiconductor and photodetector technologies. Currently at Western Digital after several roles at Tower Semiconductor, he specializes in oxide CMP and hardware development while bringing a PhD in NanoEngineering from UC San Diego where he combined hands-on device fabrication with DFT modeling and workflow automation. His background spans academia and industry—from proposing new ionic impact ionization mechanisms in perovskite photodetectors to improving yield through device layout and process control. An active contributor to the widely used pymatgen materials library, he has added core features and tests that bridge computational materials tools with experimental workflows. Based in San Diego, he blends deep scientific rigor with practical manufacturing expertise and a track record of shipping reliable hardware.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
University of California, San DiegoBachelor of Engineering (BEng) Optical Engineering, Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) Optical Engineering at Zhejiang University
English, Chinese, French
Github Skills (7)
unit-testing10
pymatgen10
science10
unit-test10
python10
materials-informatics10
testing10
Programming languages (2)
Github contributions (4)
materialsproject/pymatgen
Jun 2014 - Jul 2016
Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) is a robust materials analysis code that defines classes for structures and molecules with support for many electronic structure codes. It powers the Materials Project.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Materials Science Contributor
Back-end Developer & Materials Science ContributorContributions:17 commits, 20 pushes in 2 years
Contributions summary:Zihan primarily contributed to the `pymatgen` library by implementing and testing new methods related to materials science calculations. Their work focused on adding class and instance methods, `adsorb_atom()`, to the `Slab` class and modifying its behaviour. These contributions involved modifying core files within the pymatgen package to enhance functionality. The user also introduced unit tests to validate the correctness of the new features, demonstrating a commitment to code quality and reliability.
moleculespythonscienceelectronic-structurepowers
montoyjh/pymatgen
Jun 2015 - Nov 2015
Python Materials Genomics (pymatgen) is a robust materials analysis code that defines core object representations for structures and molecules with support for many electronic structure codes. It is currently the core analysis code powering the Materials Project.
Contributions:32 commits in 4 months
moleculespythonrepresentationselectronic-structuregenomics
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