Vikrant Tripathy

Vikrant Tripathy is a postdoctoral scholar in the Goetz Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego. He obtained his PhD from Indiana University, specializing in physical chemistry and scientific computing. During his graduate research, he developed composite quantum chemical methods with improved accuracy and efficiency for studying chemical reactions and the optical properties of materials. He also collaborated extensively with materials scientists, organic chemists, and data scientists on the development of SMILES-based materials with novel optical properties and bioactive organic molecules. Currently, he is developing an accurate hybrid QM/MM method using data-driven many-body potentials (QM/MB) for simulating chemical reactions in the condensed phase. He is also leveraging the computational efficiency of graphics processing units (GPUs) by implementing the QM/MB hybrid method in the QUICK software package. He is proficient in programming languages such as Python, Perl, Fortran, and C++, and is experienced in high-performance computing principles, including parallel programming with MPI and CUDA. He has led a group of graduate students in materials discovery and mentored both undergraduate and high school students. Vikrant has received fellowships from the Department of Chemistry at Indiana University and the Cyberinfrastructure Fellowship from SDSC.