Under the supervision of Daan Frenkel and co-supervision of Christoph Dellago I have applied advanced simulation techniques to study polar solvents far from thermal equilibrium. In particular, I am trying to understand the temperature induced alignment of molecules which leads to thermally induced monopoles. My PhD research has involved statistical modelling, numerical analysis, devising a new integration algorithm for NEMD simulations and implementing it in the open source simulation package LAMMPS.
This course comprised an excellent theoretical summary, ranging from the foundations of Statistical Mechanics to Chaos Theory, alongside practical training in Monte Carlo (MC) and Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations. For my Master's project under the joint supervision of Christoph Dellago and Daan Frenkel, I performed non-equilibrium Molecular Dynamics (NEMD) simulations using the software package LAMMPS to study an interesting non-equilibrium phenomenon called the 'thermo-polarisation effect'.
The course provided me with a thorough training in C++, High Performance Computing (OpenMP, MPI and CUDA) and numerical solutions to differential equations. For my dissertation, I implemented the C++ CFD code Impec2D to investigate the grid orientation dependence of finite-volume and elliptic solvers commonly employed in reservoir simulations. The project was supervised by Nikos Nikiforakis and Franck Monmont.
The 3-year undergraduate programme was an excellent training in maths, physics, mathematical modelling and scientific computing. My Bachelor's thesis was concerned with modelling atmospheric flows in Cartesian and spherical geometry.
As an alternative to the compulsory military service, I worked for the Red Cross for a period of 9 months and became a paramedic.
The 5-year long technical high school HTL Villach provided me with a solid background in software engineering, in particular C/C++ and Java, algorithms, data structures and data bases (SQL, PL/SQL).