Presenter

Aidan Thompson received a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994, studying statistical thermodynamics of complex fluids. Since 1997 he has worked in the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories, first as a post-doctoral appointee, and since 2021 as Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff. During that time, he has made numerous contributions to the LAMMPS particle simulation code, including parallel implementations of many prominent many-body potentials, non-Hamiltonian equations of motion, coupled lattice-spin dynamics, atomic stress tensor, and Monte Carlo methods, while also using these methods to study a wide range of problems in materials physics, described in over 80 publications. He has pioneered methods for training and running machine learning interatomic potentials in LAMMPS. He currently leads LAMMPS software development at Sandia.