January 2014 - New Employee Profiles

Wei Hu, Scientific Computing Group

Wei Hu

As a new postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Research Division’s (CRD’s) Scientific Computing Group, Wei Hu will help develop new software called, Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Density Functional Theory (DGDFT). The project is supported by the Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program.

Before coming to Berkeley Lab, Hu was a research assistant at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale. He earned his Bachelors degree and PhD in physical chemistry and computer science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

"I became interested in computing in my third year at University," says Hu. "I found that I not only liked chemistry and physics, but also mathematics, thus my research interests now focus on developing efficient software tools in quantum chemistry and applying such tools for studying large-scale nanomaterials based on the density functional theory."

Hu is also one of the principle developers of ONPAS (Order-N Quantum Chemistry Package for Large Scale Ab Initio Simulation), linear scaling software based on SIESTA for studying large-scale nanomaterials. In addition to developing and parallelizing ONPAS, Hu has also applied the technique to widely used computational software packages such as SIESTA and VASP. So far, he has published more than nine papers in peer-reviewed journals.

A native of Heifei, China, Hu says he really enjoys Bay Area weather and food scene. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, reading books, playing basketball and games.