Nichols A. Romero
Nichols A. Romero is a staff scientist and team lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
He obtained a B.S. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1999), and a Ph.D. in
Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2005). He was a National Research
Council post-doctoral fellow at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (2005-2007) and later worked as a
Computational Scientist in the High-Performance Computing Modernization Program (2007–2008) for
the Department of Defense. Romero was a post-doc at the ALCF (2008-2010) prior to being reclassified
to staff. His primary research interest is massively parallel electronic structure calculations in
condensed matter physics.
Areas of Interest: Electronic Structure of Condensed Matter, DFT, QMC, programming models, parallel
dense linear algebra
Markus Eisenbach
Dr. Markus Eisenbach is a computational scientist at the National Center for Computational Sciences
at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA. His expertise lies in first principles calculations for magnetic
materials and large scale scientific computing. He received his undergraduate education at the
University of Bristol, UK and the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany with degrees in
Mathematics and Physics. His Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics is from the University of Bristol where he
worked on magnetism in nanostructured materials. He continued working on non-collinear
magnetism and relativistic first principles calculations for metals and alloys as Postdoc in the Materials
Science and Technology Division at ORNL before joining the Scientific Computing group at the National
Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL. He is the key developer of the relativistic linear scaling
multiple scattering code (rel-LSMS) and the Wang-Landau LSMS method for first principles finite
temperature calculations of magnetic systems. He was a co-recipient of the SC’08 Gordon-Bell prize
for his contribution to the DCA++ code development and the SC'09 Gordon-Bell prize for the WangLandau-LSMS code.
Areas of Interest: Application of first principles density functional calculations and computational
statistical physics method – Monte-Carlo simulations in particular – to a wide range of condensed
matter and materials science questions mainly related to alloys and magnetic systems.
Anouar Benali
Anouar Benali is a staff scientist at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. He obtained a
B.S. and a M.S in Physics from the University of Sciences and Technology of Lille (France) (2007), and
a Ph.D. in Material Science from the University of Toulouse (2010). His worked was focused during his
Master degree on Electronic quantum transport and then on oxygen adsorption on AlCu surfaces using
DFT during his PhD. He was post-doctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory (2011-2013) prior to
being reclassified to staff. His primary research interest is Quantum Monte Carlo methods for solids and
molecules. He is a developer of the QMCPACK simulation package and his work focuses on implementing
and speeding QMC algorithms for the actual and future generation of HPC. His field of applications
concerns clusters, molecular crystals Transition metal oxides and catalysis.
Areas of Interest: Electronic Structure of Condensed Matter, QMC, Quantum Chemistry,
Multireference systems, programming models, Nested threading and C++.