RadiaSoft Names Dr. Jonathan Edelen President

RadiaSoft Names Dr. Jonathan Edelen President

RadiaSoft is rapidly expanding its products, partnerships, and personnel. We are excited to have Dr. Edelen’s talents in this position to provide ongoing leadership as we continue to grow and innovate.

RadiaSoft is happy to announce that Dr. Jonathan Edelen has been named President. An experienced member of the leadership team, Dr. Edelen will take over the duties of President effective immediately. Dr. David Bruhwiler, formerly President and CEO, will continue in the duties of CEO.

Dr. Edelen will be taking over day-to-day operations of the company. He will be primarily responsible for business development, as well as continuing to serve as Principal Investigator for multiple DOE grants focused on particle accelerator and Machine Learning technologies. 

“My vision for the company is sustainable growth as we develop innovative products and build partnerships with organizations of all sizes,” Dr. Edelen said. “I look forward to expanding our technical expertise into new areas of science and new application spaces.”

“I’m confident that Jon is the right person for this position,” said Dr. Bruhwiler. “He’s been an integral part of RadiaSoft for five years and has shown himself to be an excellent leader and innovator. The Board of Directors was unanimous in their decision to make this move and we look forward to working with him in this new role, while I focus on my responsibilities as CEO.”

Dr. Edelen is both an accomplished scientist and an experienced businessperson, with a broad range of experience in accelerator physics, Machine Learning, and business development. He studied Applied & Computational Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, was awarded Master’s and Doctoral degrees from Colorado State University, and was the Bardeen Fellow at Fermilab. 

Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Christopher Hall

Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Christopher Hall

Meet the RadiaSoft team in this ongoing Q&A series, where we introduce you to our stellar employees. Learn about their work, their background, and some of the things that make them who they are. Today, Dr. Christopher Hall talks about his multi-faceted job at Radiasoft, a few of the interesting projects he’s worked on, and some things he wishes he more people knew about accelerators.

Chris Hall RadiaSoft

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I am a research scientist, primarily focused on particle accelerator design and optimization.

What’s your educational and career background?

I have a B.S. from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. As an undergrad I worked on analysis of nuclear physics experiments to study high unstable isotopes (primarily Lithium-12 and Lithium-13) along the neutron drip line. I have a M.S. in physics from Michigan State University where I worked on design of the REA3 beamline. Finally my Ph.D. is from Colorado State University and my thesis work involved experimental analysis on the impact of coherent synchrotron radiation in the Jefferson Lab Energy Recovery Linac.

What’s the biggest misconception about your field and why?

I think one of the biggest misconceptions in the general public is about the relative prevalence of particle accelerators and their uses. The Large Hadron Collider consumes so much media attention that most people are not aware of other accelerators, like synchrotron light sources, that are used frequently in applied research.

Where did you grow up?

Until I left for college in Michigan I lived in a small town called Pataskala in central Ohio.

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you held?

When I was first starting my master’s degree at Michigan State University I did a short stint in a biophysics group. I got to work in a clean room which was interesting until I was starting to be trained on making and using piranha solution for cleaning experimental equipment. It was at that point I decided I needed to find a different research group, and ultimately ended up working for an accelerator physicist.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

I don’t know if he is ‘from history’ yet but I like Andre Geim for being the only person to have, so far, won both Ig Nobel and Nobel prizes.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I work on a wide variety of projects currently. One of the main main projects, that I am the Principal Investigator for, is focused on using a particular variety of neural network called a variational autoencoder to better analyze data from beam position monitors in particle accelerators. Beyond that I also help with a variety of projects with design optimization elements, and maintain a Python library for orchestrating optimization and data generation called rsopt.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I really like Futurama and I find their slogan amusing.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

The Futurama logo! I have a poster of it hanging over my desk.

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What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft or Sirepo?

Radiasoft’s Sirepo platform is a really great tool for using a lot of different scientific codes, many of which have complicated command line interfaces. You can get even more out of Sirepo if you are willing to switch back and forth, because both command line and GUI have their strengths. Recognizing this and learning to use each can make many tasks a lot easier than if you stick to just one or the other.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Senior Research Scientist: Dr. Jonathan Edelen

Meet Your Senior Research Scientist: Dr. Jonathan Edelen

Meet the RadiaSoft team in this ongoing Q&A series, where we introduce you to our stellar employees. Learn about their work, their background, and some of the things that make them who they are. Today, Jon Edelen, talks about his multi-faceted job at Radiasoft, a few of the interesting projects he’s worked on, and some things he wishes he more people knew about accelerators.

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

All sorts of things. I work on everything from helping to manage the company to supporting experimental efforts at national labs and at our sister company RadiaBeam. On the technical side, I work on RF controls systems, signal processing, and machine learning for accelerator diagnostics and controls. With the latter, I focus on anomaly detection, which is what we call trying to find faulty behavior in the instrument. I also model particle accelerators and have a particular interest in electron sources, including thermionic cathode physics.

What’s your educational and career background?

I graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. I did two years of magnetic signatures modeling for submarines before heading to graduate school at Colorado State University. I worked on design and optimization of the CSU Free Electron Laser (FEL) and on the physics of electron back-bombardment in thermionic cathode RF guns. After graduate school I was selected for the Bardeen Fellowship at Fermilab, which got me into the RF controls group and into working on RF modeling and combined RF/beams simulations. I also participated in high-power commissioning of a new radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) and medium-energy beam transport system. In 2017, I started at RadiaSoft where I started developing symplectic space-charge algorithms and modeling of field emission in thermionic energy converters.

What’s the biggest misconception about your field and why?

There are a lot more particle accelerators out there than people think. There are the big facilities like CERN or SLAC, but accelerators are used in all kinds of industry applications, from medical diagnostics to food safety. They come in all sizes, too, from kilometer-scale instruments to tabletop devices.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. We had a tiny high school class of 60–Everyone knew everything about everyone else. Small town life, eh?

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you held?

When I worked for the Navy I used to participate in sea trials for submarines and surface ships. It was kind of a fun experience being part of the analysis team. Usually there was only a 2-3 day window to do everything we needed to with the ship / boat and get them on to the next thing, so the schedules were tight.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

Lenhard Euler is a favorite. He’s known for the Euler Equation, which addresses complex numbers and is critically important for advanced physics and mathematics. We use this equation almost daily in anything that involves electromagnetic fields, which is most things in particle accelerator science. Georg Cantor is another honorable mention. Cantor proved that there are both countable and uncountable infinities, which is a splendid thing to think about.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I am continuously working on a ton of different projects. I am leading the design and commissioning of a RF control system for a C-Band LINAC. I am the Primary Investigator for an SBIR-funded project for building machine learning tools for large accelerator facilities, with the focus split between anomaly detection and control systems. Some of my other projects include optimizing an electron LINAC for a high efficiency Free Electron Laser experiment, helping to integrate hysteresis models in a magnetostatics simulation code, and working on a currently-languishing paper on the variation in the work function on thermionic cathodes.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I know the secrets of farm-stand produce fraud! When I was in high school, I worked on a farm during the summers. The farm had a produce stand that sold peaches from Georgia. I spent a lot of time peeling the “Georgia” stickers off the peaches so that we could sell them as “Connecticut peaches,” which are not a real thing.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

Scuttleberg!!!! Because who doesn’t love a dancing scientist crab?!

What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

We’re known largely for our software development and our expert consultants for particle accelerators, but we also have a unique expertise in plasma physics, vacuum nanoelectronics, FPGA’s, and machine learning. We do much, much more than GUI’s.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Software Developer: Evan Carlin

Meet Your Software Developer: Evan
Carlin

Meet the RadiaSoft team in this ongoing Q&A series, where we introduce you to our stellar employees. Learn about their work, their background, and some of the things that make them who they are.
Today, Evan Carlin, talks about software development at Radiasoft, some interesting projects he’s worked on, and a few of software problems that he’s solved.

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I solve problems by writing code. Most of my time is spent working on the Sirepo framework. I have worked on projects like adding the ability to run simulations on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC and allowing users to dynamically compile the FLASH code through the Sirepo interface. I also help with some other software development such as deploying a server running NVIDIA IndeX and setting up MongoDB and sirepo-bluesky on our Sirepo Jupyter server.

Outside of programming, I’m involved in the Social Justice Committee where we try to make RadiaSoft and the larger physics community more inclusive.

What’s your educational and career background?

I went to college in Tacoma Washington at the University of Puget Sound. I wanted to study economics, but the first 15 minutes of my introductory economics class taught me that I did not enjoy economics. That semester I was also in a Computer Science 101 course and I was hooked from the first assignment: modifying a Java program to move a turtle around the screen. After college, I worked at a consulting company doing a variety of programming projects. I then worked at Google, trying to improve customer support experience and internal tools.

What’s the biggest misconception about your field and why?

That you need to be good at math. Computer science departments are sometimes found inside of math departments and many people think you need to be good at math to excel at programming. Both fields share problem-solving and abstract-thinking skills, but you do not need to know much about math for most programming jobs. I took one math class in college, and I only took it so I could take a calculus-based physics class. If you like solving puzzles and don’t mind staring at a screen for hours on end, then you may be a good programmer.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in RadiaSoft’s hometown, Boulder, Colorado. I spent my entire childhood there except for when I lived in Padova, Italy when I was 12.

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you held?

In college I worked in a “keychain factory.” Really, it was the basement of a house near mine with a long wall of tables stacked with boxes of keyrings and car-logo medallions. It was a great college job because I could just show up and work a few hours whenever I had time. The downside was that making keychains is about as exciting as it sounds, and it really hurts your fingernails after a while.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

They aren’t technically scientists, but Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. They’re the cohosts of the TV show MythBusters, and were my earliest science influencers. A lot of what they did on their show used the scientific method and taught me how to break a problem down to understand it. I would love to someday own a shop like theirs and spend my time tinkering.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I am working on a project called NDVIZ. The goal is to use 3D-visualization software to interact with very large datasets. I’m getting our software deployed so our collaborators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory can try it out.

I spent more hours than I care to admit trying to create a working Docker image [a piece of software that acts like a template for building new applications] that could run the service and properly visualize the data using NVIDIA IndeX. I had the container running and IndeX was reachable, but the data that was visualized was completely black instead of lit up. I tried twiddling all sorts of parameters, using different GPU drivers, manually building different software, and even reaching out to folks at NVIDIA. Ultimately the answer, as it usually is, was in the code. There were some example Dockerfiles that showed how to properly build an image and once I adapted them everything worked. I learned a good lesson, I should’ve taken some time to explore the code I was given before jumping in and solving the problem how I thought it should be solved.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

This might be a talent, a superpower, or just completely useless depending on who you ask, but I can get anyone who is willing to try to enjoy country music. People have been scarred by the pop-country on the radio. Once you dive in and explore country music, you’ll realize that it is a vast genre. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of James Hand. His voice and style of play are not the most accessible but his lyrics are haunting.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

My favorite is the man dancing. I like to use it instead of thumbs up when I’m happy or in agreement with something.

What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

I wish people knew that even though the main focus of RadiaSoft’s work is particle physics, we are solving many difficult software problems, too. For example, we have written a distributed job-management system that uses asynchronous Python. We learned many interesting bits about Python through that project that I would like to someday share with the larger software community.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your CTO: Rob Nagler

Meet Your CTO: Rob Nagler

Meet the RadiaSoft team in this ongoing Q&A series, where we introduce you to our stellar employees. Learn about their work, their background, and some of the things that make them who they are.

Today, Rob Nagler talks about the strategy of software programming, some interesting projects he’s worked on, and a few of the many companies he’s founded.

Rob Nagler RadiaSoft

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I help people with software and hardware. The software might be accounting systems or how to use a new tool. I also try to eliminate bottlenecks for the rest of the software team. Programmers should be programming, not dealing with license or hardware issues.

Whats your educational and career background?

I took my first computer course when I was nine years old, back when computers filled up entire rooms. I taught myself how to build electronics and software programs until high school when I took my first Basic and Fortran classes. I got degrees at UCSD and Stanford in computer engineering.
Although my focus is primarily software, I have been involved with hardware throughout my career. I’ve worked for big and small companies, but mostly, I’ve worked at startups, many of which I founded.

Whats the biggest misconception about your field and why?

People think programming is difficult. In many ways it is, but it often comes down to solving simple problems in a structured and specific way. I think the “structured” and “specific” parts are what trips people up. Sometimes they give too explicit instructions, and other times the instructions are too vague. Getting it Goldilocks-right is about taking the time to find the simplest way of talking about a problem. When this happens, the software writes itself.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in East Meadow, NY. It’s a small town on Long Island with many Levitt homes, where most people would commute by train to work.

Before joining RadiaSoft, whats the strangest or most interesting job youve held?

Over the years I’ve started 15 or so companies. Many of these startups operated concurrently so at times I wore (and still wear) different hats. I’ve had to act as a fiduciary for one company while negotiating with another company I owned.
One of my more fun startups was a nonprofit designed to encourage kids to ride their bikes to school. At one time 50 schools were running the program. Technology was involved: the kids had RFID tags on their bike helmets, and a solar-powered RFID reader was installed at the schools to count them as they arrived.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

While there are interesting historical computer scientists, I prefer thinking about the people I’ve worked with who are not famous such as David Cheriton, Tom Lyon, Paul Moeller, Roger Sumner, and Ion Yadigaroglu. These people are my favorites because of how they influenced me and shaped my career.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I am working on improving our accounting at RadiaSoft. I like this project because I can solve a problem for people without a lot of complex software. The problem has a lot of moving parts, but the solution is relatively simple and eliminates most of the need for manual entry. Not only is manual entry tedious for people, it’s error prone. Now, we can take our data from our timekeeping system, generate some inputs to Quickbooks, Paychex, and Excel, and eliminate hours and hours of manual entry from one system to another. It makes me happy to solve a direct problem for someone.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldnt guess?

Fun fact: I lived in Switzerland for 12 years. I was not the type of person to travel after college. Rather, I just went to work. A friend of a friend needed some help running a software company in Zurich so I hopped on a plane after a couple of phone calls. I had never been to Switzerland before. I didn’t even have a visa, which resulted in a rather sticky situation with the Fremdenpolizei.

Whats your favorite Slack emoji and why?

I don’t like emojis. Bah humbug. I am old fashioned, and I use emoticons. 🙂

Whats something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

We are a small company with many different projects, which can be quite complicated to manage. While our project deliverable is usually a research paper, we try to make sure we also add some features to our flagship product, Sirepo. Doing this benefits the larger scientific community because Sirepo is open source. In this way, we’ve been able to grow Sirepo from a simple application to the rich, multi-faceted scientific gateway it is today.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Software Developer: Paul Moeller

Meet Your Software Developer: Paul Moeller

Curious about our team of software developers at RadiaSoft? You can meet them, one-on-one, in this ongoing Q&A series. Every month, we introduce you to another member of the RadiaSoft team and they tell you about their work, background, and some of the things that make them who they are.

Today, Paul Moeller talks about the advice he’d give to software developers, the new machine learning app he’s working on, and the thing he wants most from Sirepo users.

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

As a principal software developer, I work on Sirepo. That entails bringing various scientific codes to our browser-based framework and putting nice user interfaces on them. Almost all of them are open-source; some scientists created this software themselves or it passed through time with different people maintaining it. (For example, Zgoubi, a Fortran code, has been around since the ’70s and that’s one of the ones Sirepo supports.)

These scientific codes are out there for anyone to get, but it’s really hard for a regular person to actually run them. They’d have to get it to their computer, compile everything, and make it work. You might have to write a file and feed it into it, for example. We at RadiaSoft try to take all of that information out and build a schema for it, which is like making a map of all the inputs for a code and then arranging them to make logical sense and build a user interface for it. The nice thing about what we do, what Sirepo does, is make it so users don’t need to go through all that, they can just run these codes from their browsers.

What’s your educational and career background?

I always knew that I wanted to study computer science, even when I was in high school. I enjoyed working on software. So I went to a small undergrad called Clarke College in my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa. I also had a music minor in undergrad. Then I got my master’s degree at Loyola University in Chicago and got a job right after that in Chicago. I went to work for a company that wrote software for manufacturing, accounting, and logistics, similar to SAP and Oracle. I worked there for four years, then got married and moved to Boulder, Colorado.

I knew I wanted to live in Boulder because I had a sister who lived here for a while and always thought it was a great place. My wife went to CU then. I met Rob Nagler, our CTO. and joined him at Bivio Inc., and the company evolved into a consulting services business. We met David and that’s how we joined RadiaSoft. This is all over a 20 year span.

What’s some advice you’d give to other software developers?

In general, computer scientists and developers get caught in the language and the technology being used rather than the problem they are trying to solve. You can’t have one hammer that hits every nail. There’s a big advantage to using different technologies for different issues, but also understand that the technology you’re using today will be very different or even obsolete in a few years. Remember that clients often come to you with the technology they want, rather than the problem they have.

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?

Back in 1990, when I was in undergrad, I spent the summer working for Central City Opera as a festival staff member. A friend of mine from college and I traveled out to Colorado from Iowa and mopped rehearsal floors, picked up garbage, manned phones, and ushered the performances—all for $25 a day. As an usher I saw around 10 performances of La Traviata, Cosi Fan Tutte, and The Merry Widow each.

If you could invite a pioneer from your field to dinner, who would it be and why?

I would invite a young Steve Jobs, when he was young and crazy, right after he left Apple and when he was doing stuff with Pixar and Next. That would be an interesting time in his life to have a conversation. I really like his approach to making products because they are superior to their competitors. I’d be very curious to figure out what it is about him and how he makes decisions that result in such amazing products. That’s really the million dollar question.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

One project I’m working on is called Webcon. One of our senior research scientists, Jon Edelen, is heading that one up. It’s making a web app that lets you classify or apply machine learning to a dataset. It is a general purpose app which is kind of neat, as opposed to a lot of the work we do which is very specific, related to a beamline or a particular machine.

In Activait, you can upload a bunch of data, select what parts of the data you’re interested in, visualize it, partition it, and classify it. You can discover information from the raw data through classification and correlations.

In general, Activait can be used with any sort of data. It’s not only accelerator-science specific. There was one dataset I was looking at which tried to figure out whether you have diabetes or not. There were lots of inputs, like glucose levels. You let the machine learning just crunch away at it and predict. Machine learning is new to me and it’s an exciting project. It’s a product that’s live, but that we’re all actively working on. So it’s going to get better and better.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I run a lot. If I’m not working, I’m most likely running. On weekends, I run short races, virtual races, these days. In the summertime, I’ll run 50 miles a week, fewer in bad winter weather. It’s definitely something I enjoy, but even five years earlier I would have said it was soccer. But eventually I got old enough that I thought, it’s better just to run rather than put myself in harm’s way.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

This is not one I use a lot, but one I like is the Walking the Dog emoji. It comes up a lot on our software team Slack channel because many people are walking dogs at various times. It’s what we use when we’re unavailable. Otherwise, I just stick to the thumbs-up emoji.

What’s something you wish people understood better about Sirepo?

I wish people understood that we’re always developing Sirepo and continually improving it. If you’ve used Sirepo and you think it’s nice, but it doesn’t do X thing. Let us know! I would love more feedback from active Sirepo users. It’s not a typical customer-service black hole with Sirepo. One of us will get back to you and you might even change the program for the better. We are totally open to supporting someone’s wishlist. Sirepo’s target customers are such a small portion of the world, it is something we can do. We’re very focused on a specific area, so the more buy-in we can get from people in those areas the better we can make the product for them.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Research Scientist: Stephen Coleman, PhD

Meet Your Research Scientist: Stephen Coleman, PhD

Curious about our team of stellar research scientists here at RadiaSoft? We’ve got you covered—meet the team, one-on-one, in this ongoing Q&A series. Every month, we introduce you to another of RadiaSoft’s scientists and they tell you about their work, background, and some of the things that make them who they are.

Today, Dr. Stephen Coleman talks about how he got an Erdős-Bacon number, his electron cooling modeling project, and the misconception of physics as a monolith.

Stephen Coleman RadiaSoft

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I’m a research scientist. I’ve been at RadiaSoft for about a year, which means I don’t have any of my own projects yet. Instead, I’m a worker bee on a couple of other projects. I skew to the computational side of things. Right now I’m working on a plasma simulation project called Flashcap, modeling plasma and capillaries for wakefield accelerators.

I’m also working on another project using the JSPEC app on Sirepo, which is for modeling magnetized electron cooling in accelerators. The JSPEC project is aimed at informing the design for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) at Brookhaven National Lab. An upcoming project will have me working with CU, here in Boulder, to build a magnetic focusing horn.

Whats your educational and career background?

I went to the University of Colorado (CU) as an undergrad for physics, then grad school in physics at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I worked on an experiment called MINOS, which was a neutrino oscillation experiment with a beamline originating at Fermilab aimed at a detector in an iron mine in Northern Minnesota.

After grad school, I got a postdoc at CU. So I came back to Colorado and worked with one of my old professors on a different neutrino oscillation experiment called T2K, in Japan. It’s based out of an accelerator on the east coast of Japan that shoots neutrinos to a detector on the west coast of Japan. I did that for a few years, then got an interesting opportunity to work on a DARPA-funded project also at CU, across the street from where I had been working, but as something kind of like a biostatistician. It was a big career change there for a little while. I did that for about five years.

Whats the biggest misconception about your field and why?

I’m a bit of a generalist, not sure if I’d say I have a specific subfield of physics. I do skew on the computational side of things, but even within that area you can talk to someone about plasma modeling, you can talk to someone else about particle physics modeling, and they’re completely different worlds, even though it’s all physics, all computational.

I guess the misconception would be that it’s monolithic. If you talked to the average person on the street, they don’t know what a physicist does, day in, day out. They might think that you spend your time writing on a chalkboard. But it’s such a rich and varied collection of subfields, some of which align more closely than others. For instance, I have friends at NIST, just down the street from RadiaSoft’s office, who work with table-top laser experiments all day, and we talk past each other when we chat about work. It’s like we’re speaking completely different languages.

Even within accelerator physics, people don’t realize accelerators have industrial and medical uses, that it is not strictly collider-focused. It’s more than CERN, and Fermilab, and SLAC. There are real-world applications like irradiating food for sterilization or irradiating barrels of seeds to get rid of pests.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up just outside of Richmond, Virginia, in a suburb called Chesterfield County, which is on the south side of the James River that goes through Richmond.

Here’s a little fun tidbit: I have an aunt who does genealogy and she’s traced our family back many generations. Among our ancestors there are French Huguenots who sailed to the United States in the early 1700s, and that landed…on the south side of the James River, in what later became Chesterfield County.

Before joining RadiaSoft, whats the strangest or most interesting job youve held?

When I was young, I was a bit of a theater kid and did plays and commercials and movies. (When I was 11, I was in a movie called Major Payne, which is a Damon Wayans’ military academy movie.) I do have an IMDb page. This acting experience means I am one of the rare people who has an Erdős-Bacon number.

Paul Erdős was a brilliant mathematician, very prolific, and he authored tons and tons of different papers with different people. If you can connect yourself—you were an author with someone who was an author with someone who authored a paper with him, then you have an Erdős number of three.

It’s a big thing among mathematicians and physicists to brag about your Erdős number, but at the same time, there’s also your Kevin Bacon number, if you’re an actor. The Erdős-Bacon number is where you add them together. My Erdős number is four and my Bacon number is three, so I have the same Erdős-Bacon number (seven) as Natalie Portman. Then, if you really want to get into it, there’s another number called the Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number, if you recorded with someone who recorded with Black Sabbath. Not a lot of people with that. I suppose there’s still time for me to get that one. The Erdős-Bacon is rare enough.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

I’d go with John von Neumann. He was a brilliant scientist who published a lot in math and physics. He was part of the Manhattan Project and eventually landed at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he was basically given the freedom to do whatever he wanted. It’s amazing how much of our modern computing structures came from him, from him toying around with ENIAC, the existing supercomputer at that time. We owe Monte Carlo simulation to his physics and computational insights. There’s some quote from Hans Bethe about how von Neumann was evidence that there was a higher species of human.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I’m working on a project called MCool that uses JSPEC to model the cooling of ion beams in the EIC. In the EIC, we want to keep the emittance down as the ion bunches cycle and speed up. You can do this by co-propagating an electron bunch with the ion bunch in a strong magnetic field.

It’s a tough project because there are only a few times that this technique has even been tried and there’s not a lot of agreement, even in the theoretical community, about how you determine what the magnitude of the cooling will be. But being able to computationally model that with any of the friction force models that there are, and being able to tell a computer to optimize for a given set of conditions, is going to be crucial to designing the new cooler in the EIC. Essentially, I’m working on one of the tools that will hopefully let us do that.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldnt guess?

I’m a decent musician and play a few instruments. I was in the CU marching band, playing trumpet. I can also play guitar and used to play upright bass in a jazz band.

Whats your favorite Slack emoji and why?

I like the Homer Disappearing Into Bushes we have on our Slack. The company as a whole is really collegial, so there’s little to no workplace drama at all. I think it’s funny to drop Homer Disappearing Into Bushes sometimes to pretend there’s a big controversy that I don’t want to be a part of.

Whats something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

Between all the scientists we have on the team, we have both a lot of areas of collaborative overlap and a whole lot of unique specialties. We are representative of how diverse the field of knowledge is in real life. This means that we can draw upon institutional knowledge for problem solving, and can come up with creative ways to try to solve a problem that draws on experience outside of a particular sub-field. Basically, any problem a client might have, we have the right people to figure it out.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Research Scientist: Boaz Nash, PhD

Meet Your Research Scientist: Boaz Nash, PhD

Welcome to our ongoing Q&A series where we introduce you to RadiaSoft’s stellar team and they tell you about their work, background, and some of the things that make them who they are.

Today, Dr. Boaz Nash talks about which scientists he’d invite to a dinner party, his work on synchrotron light sources and X-ray optics, and his recent art show.

Boaz Nash RadiaSoft

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I am a research scientist. This means I manage scientific projects and work on other people’s technical projects, mostly related to software and modeling for particle accelerators and synchrotron light sources. I’d say I have most experience with light sources. The interplay between the electron beam side and the X-ray or synchrotron radiation side is where I’ve done most of my work.

What’s your educational and career background?

I went to Reed College and studied math and physics. I worked on classical mechanics. We had to do a thesis and mine was a strange one related to transporting systems—trying to mathematically define what it means to take a system and move it and what aspects change about it when you transport it. I was able to make progress on the problem by relating it to the theory of adiabatic invariants. My thesis advisors were Nicholas Wheeler in physics and Thomas Wieting. I learned a lot from both of them.

After graduating, I spent a year programming computers in Portland, Oregon, for Richard Crandall at a consulting company called Perfectly Scientific. I did algorithm development and worked for Pixar on lossless image compression (using stills from A Bug’s Life) and solid noise generation, among other projects. It was there that I learned programming, mainly with C and Mathematica.

Then I got into graduate school at Stanford for physics. I didn’t know what I would focus on. However, at a physics open house event, I was introduced to Ron Ruth at SLAC and learned about accelerator physics.  He introduced me to Alex Chao and I was asked to give a talk about my undergraduate thesis project. They liked my talk. Alex—who’s written a lot of textbooks in accelerator physics—is one of the people who has really helped to make particle accelerator science an academic discipline. I started working for him as a graduate student in 2000.

I liked that I could immediately make progress on different projects, whereas, if I did string theory or condensed matter physics, I felt like it might be a year or longer before I would be able to do useful work on problems. Accelerator physics had all of these really hard yet accessible problems, so there was stuff to be done on it. During my six and a half years doing my PhD, I worked on electron storage rings, a high energy electron beam, steered and controlled by specially designed magnets and RF cavities.

My work on electron storage rings led me to study synchrotron light sources and I took my first post-doc position at the NSLS-II at Brookhaven National Lab. After three years, I took a second postdoc at ESRF, another synchrotron light source, in Grenoble, France. After eight years at the ESRF, I returned to the U.S., and took my present position at RadiaSoft. In fact, I was originally hired at RadiaSoft to work on an X-ray optics grant, which was in collaboration with Brookhaven National Lab using the software SRW, working with the author, Oleg Chubar.

So, overall, there has been a certain continuity to my career. Through all of these transitions to different labs, I learned to use a number of different beam dynamics codes, such as Tracy, Elegant, Mad-X, and Accelerator Toolbox. I was always interested in creating community around these tools that are used at many labs internationally, and I helped develop a collaboration involving the Accelerator Toolbox code that is still active today.

What’s the biggest misconception about your field and why?

People tend to think that it’s a very applied field. It is, in certain ways, but it’s also very theoretical. If you are an accelerator physicist, you may work in an accelerator control room, but you may also spend a lot of time solving really hard physics problems. I think the misconception persists because of the way that accelerators are used.

In particle physics, for example, accelerators are just there to give you high-energy particles to “uncover the foundations of the universe, the structure of particles,” a very exciting notion. Other applications, like proton therapy for cancer or synchrotron light sources creating X-rays used for studying materials and biology, are also very visible to the public. This all means the actual accelerator science is often not seen because it gets a bit overshadowed by the applications and scientific results.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Santa Cruz, California.

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?

Probably my programming job at Perfectly Scientific. It was in the basement of a house above Reed College called The Center for Advanced Computation.

Richard Crandall was definitely a character and a really smart guy. He partly owned a bar called the Lutz in Portland and was a Reed College professor. He passed away in 2012. At one point he had found the largest explicitly known prime number in existence (a Mersenne prime). At the time, you could buy a poster from Perfectly Scientific with all the digits of the prime number printed out in tiny black print, creating a gray mass of numbers, barely legible without a magnifying glass.

If you could invite any scientist, living or dead, to dinner, who would it be and why?

That’s a good question. I’d have to say the founders of quantum mechanics. I’d just love to be a part of some of those early debates on quantum mechanics with Einstein and Bohr. I’d love to talk with Paul Dirac (famously unsociable).

The people-side of scientists has always been really interesting to me and I’ve been slowly learning more about their lives. What has historically motived them? These scientists have created huge amounts of technical and mathematical work. How did they manage to do so much in their life?

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I recently had my beamline control project get funded, which I’m excited about. It’s the first project I came up with myself that got funding.

The way I see it, it’s a continuation of some of what I’ve learned about electron beams but applied to X-rays traveling down a beamline. The connection between the electrons and photons was a big theme of my work at ESRF. This project is creating something called an “online model” of an X-ray beamline to allow the scientists to have better control and understanding of their beamline in real time. The operators of particle accelerators would be lost without such a living, dynamic model. And I thought that some of the same tools could be applied to the photon beamline.

One difference between electrons and photons in light and radiation is the concept of coherence. Light coming from the sun or most light bulbs is incoherent. Lasers, however, are almost fully coherent. But synchrotron radiation is partially coherent. The new generation of light sources are increasing this coherence, but understanding partial coherence is still crucial. So, I’m working on how to describe that and understand the state of this beam passing down a beamline. This would allow scientists to know exactly what’s happening in their beamlines.

When beamline elements get misaligned, scientists can use realignment algorithms. That’s standard on the electron beam side but hasn’t really been applied to the beamlines. This project also involves application of machine learning, which has recently been very successful at improving control in particle accelerators.

Ultimately, I’d like to have software that allows beamline scientists to look at plots of what’s happening to their X-ray beamline through the mirrors, lenses, gratings, etc., and provide automated algorithms to better align things more quickly. It would save both time and manpower if we could detect problems or misalignments faster and fix them more automatically.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I’m an abstract painter. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid. I’ve never been very professional about it, but I have a studio space and was in a show recently at the Avalon, which is like a dance studio with a big parking lot in Boulder.

It was a drive-thru art show. Art in the time of COVID! I had two parking spots: one for my car and one for my art. There were 60 other artists also showing—dancers, musicians, and lots of other stuff going on.


What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

That we’re filling a really important role in the particle physics / light source community with Sirepo. Some standard software in accelerator physics is incredibly hard to use. And the same software keeps being rewritten over and over again. So, when it gets beyond a certain complexity, you really need software engineers to work on it.

I think a lot of people recognize this issue with beam dynamics software, but most scientists with expertise in accelerators and light sources don’t have the time or resources to build software beyond a certain complexity. You can waste enormous amounts of time trying to set them up on your own and pass data between them and get reasonable plots out. Some of that is what you do for a PhD, but I think a lot of it is not that useful.

The Sirepo platform, which hosts nice interfaces for these codes, makes them easier to use, and being open source, allows for community development and collaboration across multiple institutions. I think it’s a really good service to the community.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

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Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Nathan Cook

Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Nathan Cook

Learn about RadiaSoft’s stellar team in our ongoing Q&A series. Today, we speak with Dr. Nathan Cook about his current research, the biggest misconception about his field, and more.

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

First and foremost, I am a research scientist. I spend a good amount of my time studying accelerator and plasma systems through grants provided by the Department of Energy and through customers at National Labs and universities.

Right now, my primary focus is on advanced accelerator concepts technology, which includes plasma accelerators. Those are technologies for accelerating particles over shorter distances to create more compact accelerators. I’m also actively engaged in research on small-scale devices for power generation. I do a lot of work with particle-in-cell and fluid codes to model these kinds of systems for a broad variety of applications.

I am also a group leader, which means I provide support, feedback, and guidance for a number of RadiaSoft scientists. Our group is colloquially known as the applied physics group.

What’s your educational and career background?

I received my undergraduate degree in math and physics from Williams College, then my PhD in physics from Stony Brook University in 2014. There I studied accelerator physics and worked at Brookhaven National Lab. That’s where I was first introduced to accelerators.

After graduating, I was anticipating moving to California, where my wife lived, but I was contacted by Stephen Webb, who’s another RadiaSoft employee, as well as a Stony Brook alum and friend. He encouraged me to apply to RadiaSoft. I did and joined in 2015.

What’s the biggest misconception about your field and why?

There is a tendency to think that accelerator or plasma physicists are only working on large collaborative international projects. That there’s only the LHC, or there’s only some large-scale project to study, and that most of the time we’re working to further this singular project aim.  Certainly, that’s not been my experience, nor is it the case at RadiaSoft.

The reality is that there are myriad applications of accelerators, ranging from very very small-scale devices to produce electricity (thermionic converters, for example, are essentially reliant on accelerator technology) to small-scale light sources and detectors. In fact, a variety of applications across industries rely on small teams to produce small devices.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a suburb between Baltimore and Washington. It’s known for being one of the original planned communities.

Before joining RadiaSoft, what’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?

The most interesting job I had was a part-time one in undergrad working for the Williams College website where I wrote about stuff going on around campus. Throughout my high school and early college education I was very interested in journalism—to the point that I considered becoming a journalist in lieu of pursuing science. I did a lot with my high school newspaper; I was editor for two years and did many other programs.

Williams is an interesting place because even though it was a small liberal arts school with a few thousand people in the middle of Massachusetts, they bring in all these artists, performers, and festivals. The cultural and community events were much more diverse and interesting than you’d expect.

Having the opportunity to write about different people, projects, and events helped me learn more about the community at a time that I was feeling very much out of my element.

Who is your favorite scientist from history and why?

This one’s really tough. I’d have to say Tycho Brahe. Partially because I was very interested in astronomy when I first started studying physics. Among astronomers he has a certain reputation because he was such a strange character with a larger-than-life personality.

Brahe was prominent in the late 1500s. This was a time when people still were resistant to the idea of planets orbiting the sun, but they were also starting to observe the motions of heavenly bodies and saw things that flew in the face of preconceived ideas. The Danish government gave Brahe access to an island off the coast of Denmark, which now is part of Sweden, I think. He built a castle, laboratory, and observatory and started doing science with a few other people, including Johannes Kepler. He also threw huge parties and got into a lot of trouble. I mean, he is famous for having lost his nose in a duel.

Yet Brahe still was producing some of the most accurate observations and measurements of the motions of bodies that had ever existed. His work was instrumental in enabling Kepler to form the three laws of planetary motion, which were essentially the foundation for Newtonian gravity. I find it fascinating that this person, who didn’t seem like your standard scientist, contributed so powerfully to the foundational elements of astronomy and basic physics principles in such a weird, tumultuous era.

I named my cat after him, and didn’t realize until later that Cat Tycho has a white nose, so it looks like he’s also wearing a false nose like the real Tycho.

Tell us about one of your current projects.

I’m working on a project called Flashcap, which is intending to model plasma systems for advanced accelerators. It’s very important to the community because it’s been recently demonstrated that by generating a controlled plasma density profile you can improve the quality of electron beams that are interacting with these plasmas by several orders of magnitude, potentially. (Several world records for energy and beam quality have been set by using specific types of structures called capillary discharge plasmas.)

I’m really excited because prior to this work there were very few tools out there to model these systems. It’s an opportunity for us to have a broader impact on the accelerator community by supplying them with a tool that addresses the needs of a really exciting technology. It’s already garnered positive feedback in the international community and from collaborators like Berkeley Lab, DESY, and scientists at the University of Strathclyde.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I won a Kelloggs-sponsored cereal-eating contest in college. Anyone on campus could go to the dining hall and participate. I won. The prize was an Xbox, which was awesome to an undergrad.

The cereal was terrible, though. It was a promotional event, so they were doing market research on new cereals or something. I can best describe it as a cross between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Frosted Flakes. It was a pain because not only was it overwhelming to eat that kind of cereal in large quantities but you really needed a good amount of milk for it not to hurt your mouth. It made for an extra layer of challenge.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

My favorite is a custom one called Coffee Slayer. It’s based on a character from a Japanese anime called Goblin Slayer. The character is a great mercenary who just goes around killing goblins because he has a lifelong vendetta against them. He does so with utter tenacity and focus to the point that it’s cliche, almost a meme. He never takes his helmet off, which is another meme.

So, you take this absurd character and put a little espresso cup in his hand and imagine that instead of spending all his time slaying goblins he’s just sitting in a café drinking coffee, which is hilarious. I also love coffee, so I like using it as a status for grinding away at your work while drinking coffee, which is something I think all scientists can appreciate.

What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

What people don’t understand is that we’re in a unique position at RadiaSoft where we can work with so many different people in the field and so many sub-disciplines within the accelerator, beam physics, and energy and nuclear physics communities. It’s very rare for us to work on a single project or a single aim for five years, but it’s commonplace for academia or national labs with long-term R&D.

We have to be a lot more agile and come up to speed on things and make a contribution and then move in a one- to three-year time scale. That, I think, is an underappreciated challenge and a really great and fun aspect of working at RadiaSoft.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.

Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Stephen Webb

Meet Your Research Scientist: Dr. Stephen Webb

Learn about RadiaSoft’s world-class team in our new Q&A series. Today, we speak with Dr. Stephen Webb, a senior research scientist, about his job, current research, favorite scientist from history, and more.

What do you do at RadiaSoft?

I spend a lot of my time working on R&D projects for the Department of Energy (DOE). Right now, I’m focused on a project to model a novel ultra-high-efficiency free-electron laser (FEL) configuration for an experiment that we’ll be conducting with RadiaBeam, UCLA, and Argonne National Laboratory. In the past, I’ve done a lot of beam dynamics with people at Fermilab and algorithm development and modeling of complex accelerator systems.

Aside from the R&D, I’ve been doing some mentorship for new scientists. I work with them to get up to speed with how we do things and try to learn new skills from them at the same time.

What’s your educational and career background?

I have an undergraduate degree in physics from Georgia Tech. After that, I enrolled at Stony Brook University. While my original background was in condensed matter physics, I bounced around until I landed in the accelerator group at Brookhaven National Laboratory and, ultimately, did my PhD on free-electron laser theory.

Shortly after finishing that program, I moved out to Colorado to take a job at a small R&D company. Then when David, our CEO, started up RadiaSoft, he hired me away as the first full-time employee. I’ve been working at RadiaSoft ever since.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in suburban Atlanta, not too far from where Donald Glover, the comedian and musician, grew up. He’s got a couple stories about a Home Depot and I know that Home Depot!

Before joining RadiaSoft, what is the strangest or most interesting job you’ve held?

I worked at a used bookstore in Atlanta during summers in college. I’ve got so many stories about that place. One day, a man came in without a shirt or shoes holding a garbage bag full of romance novels to sell. Me and a coworker had to go through a full bag of mildewy paperback romances. We only took eight of them.

We had another regular who’d we actually close the store down for. He was a therapist at the local prison, with a fascinating background, and he’d stock his library with a few grand worth of books on slow Sunday evenings.

Who is your favorite scientific figure from history and why?

The first person that comes to mind is the guy who invented group theory, Évariste Galois. In 1832, when he was 20, he ended up in a duel with someone over a woman and he knew he was going to die because he wasn’t much of a fighter.

He spent the last night before the duel writing down everything, all the math that was in his head. He was shot and later died. Those papers became the foundation for group theory, which is fundamental for math and physics.

Tell us about one of your current or future projects.

I’m pitching a project to DOE on how we can use machine learning for accelerator controls. One of the things with autonomous accelerators, i.e. where the machine does most of the deciding, is that it has to figure out when its diagnostic measurements are faulty.

A human can easily look at a diagnostic measurement and go, yeah, that’s bad. But figuring out how to do that purely with the diagnostic information is a challenging problem. It’s also absolutely necessary for autonomous accelerators. If you don’t have that, it can’t be truly autonomous.

Right now, the approach that’s used for automatic tuning of accelerators is very binary. For example, Diagnostic A is behaving within some tolerance and then it very abruptly goes outside of that. When that happens, the machine drops the diagnostic completely.

What I am working on is a way to allow diagnostics to gracefully fail. That way, you can see that it’s starting to fail, but is still useful right now. It lets you know when to put in a purchase order, while you continue to extract info until you replace it, or it fails.

What is a talent, secret superpower, or fun fact about yourself that people wouldn’t guess?

I’ve been doing aikido for 14 years and am a second-degree black belt. I’ve also been to 20 countries, but never south of the equator.

What’s your favorite Slack emoji and why?

It’s one I made for our Slack, called jetbarf, which I hand drew. It’s a smiley face barfing the jet colormap. We use it to describe a bad plot.

No one should use jet in their figures. It’s overwhelming and there’s all this color-perception theory about why jet is terrible.

What’s something you wish people understood better about RadiaSoft?

RadiaSoft has operated in a lot of different worlds, and because those worlds don’t talk to each other, many people see the company as only Sirepo or RadiaSoft Scientific Consulting.

It’s really all of it. We’re a small enough team that it’s very easy to take disparate disciplines and put them in one room to solve a hard problem. We have a staff with a broad background of talent. Most of our scientists are experts in two or three different fields. We’re an interdisciplinary group that’s very good at porting our skills to new problems. Basically, if you bring us a problem, we might not have solved it exactly, but we probably have the skillset required to attack it.

Want to learn more about the RadiaSoft team? Visit our team page for full bios.