About

My friends call me Piper or Pipes but Joanna or any nicknames derivative of that will work!

I’m a grad student at Oregon State University where I will get my PhD in mechanical engineering with an option in thermal fluid sciences and a minor in nuclear engineering sometime in 2025 (fingers crossed).

My current research is in dynamic Monte Carlo neutron transport for high performance/heterogeneous compute systems enabled by Python. This research is part of the Center for Exascale Monte Carlo Neutron Transport (CEMeNT) which is funded by the NNSA, through which I will get to run computer programs on some of the largest supercomputers in the world! I also work on developing transient deterministic neutron transport algorithms for GPU computations.

The common thread in my work is how to solve radiation transport problems (mainly neutrons but also occasionally photons) on modern HPC architectures full of interesting heterogeneous architectures and occasionally bespoke hardware accelerators. My work sits somewhere in between numerical methods, neutral particle transport phenomena, sustainable scientific software development, and exaclass (really big) high performance computing research. Hopefully that word salad means something to ya!

While in grad school I have worked at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Data Center GPU solutions, and Los Alamos National Lab (XCP-3 & CCS-2) adding functionality to production transport codes. Before that in undergrad I interned at Argonne and Thomas Jefferson National Labs where I worked on superconducting and conventional particle accelerator magnet design and optimization.

In my free time I like to volunteer at the historic Whiteside Theater in Corvallis, make a pretty good pun every now and again, and hang out with my dog Rudy (Shar-Pie Shepherd mix of some kind) and my roommate’s dog Pamela (German Shorthair Pointer) pictured below.

Rudy was adopted from Heartland Humane Society and I could not recommend them more if you’re looking for a fury friend in the mid Willamette valley area.

Academic Lineage

My full academic lineage can be found thru my advisor’s (Kyle Niemeyer) Mathematics Genealogy Project profile. It’s kinda fun to go snooping around and see who you can find!