Jack Deslippe Joins NERSC User Services

Jack Deslippe has joined NERSC's User Services Group as a consultant with expertise in materials sciences and chemistry.

As the newest materials science and chemistry consultant in NERSC's User Services Group, Jack Deslippe will be building and evaluating materials sciences packages, working with users on materials sciences application needs, and providing general user support. He will also be collaborating with scientists from the Advanced Light Source, Molecular Foundry and CRD to develop a set of interfaces and tools to directly aid beamline science, and will be helping to add more interactivity to the MyNERSC web and mobile site.

Though Deslippe may be new to User Services Group, he is no stranger to NERSC. As a Clemson University undergrad, Deslippe computed on the facility's systems with his advisor Murray Daw. Later while pursuing his doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley with support from the Department of Energy's Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program, Deslippe computed at NERSC with Steven Louie and Marvin Cohen in the Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division.

During this time, he picked up a lot of new skills relating to parallel computing and other HPC topics and began to apply them to a set of existing, but un-optimized and minimally parallel computer codes in his research group. The culmination of this work is the impending release of the BerkeleyGW package intended to be the code of choice for materials scientists studying excited state properties. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, Deslippe's family moved to Charleston, South Carolina when he was in high school and he spent much of his life there. "Of all the places I've lived, the Bay Area is by far my favorite place to be. The food alone would make my case, but I also love being surrounded by such a diverse population, intellectual and cultural, and by limitless outdoor opportunities," adds Deslippe.