Yu-Chieh "Jay" Chi

Biography

Prior to joining the Center for Scientific Computing (CSC) at UCSB in 2022, Jay had a background in computational science. During his doctoral research, he focused on parallel scientific computing, particularly emphasizing density functional theory (DFT) in electronic structure calculations. He studied the stochastic approach to reduce the high computational cost in calculating the random phase approximation (RPA) correlation energy in Kohn-Sham density functional theory (KS-DFT), to obtain sufficiently accurate electronic structure properties. He also investigated the development of high-quality local pseudo-potentials, a crucial element in enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of orbital-free density functional theory (OF-DFT) calculations. In order to do large-scale scientific computing, he developed supercomputing expertise, particularly in parallel computing in C/C++, Fortran, and Python. He assists researchers in different computational science disciplines port their computing and data analysis pipelines to national supercomputers or campus HPC clusters. Jay represents UCSB as the ACCESS campus champion and is also a certified instructor of Software Carpentry.

Other Fun Facts

Jay moved from one Sunshine State, Florida, to another Sunshine State, California, or the Disney World State to Disney Land State. Jay loves road trips a lot, so he drove a moving truck alone from Florida to California on the I-10 highway. Jay feels pleasure working at the same University (UCSB) as Professor Walter Kohn, who developed the density functional theory (DFT).