About

Dr. David Williams–Young, Ph.D.
Public PGP    PGPMIT    (PGP Fingerprint: A11E 7248 EF13 C14A 1A8D 85E0 8160 2572 73C4 F947)
The opinions and values expresed on this site are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or former employers.

I’m a software engineer and computational scientist specializing in the develoment of high-performance computational chemistry software. My interests primarily lie at the intersection of heterogenous, accelerated computing, computational physics, and numerical linear algebra. Currently, I am a Principal Software Engineer in the Azure Quantum Elements Group at Microsoft, where I am the Technical Lead for the Accelerated DFT product.

Over the years, I’ve architected and/or contributed to a number of computational chemistry software packages, including NWChemEx, Chronus Quantum (ChronusQ), Psi4, Massively Parallel Quantum Chemistry (MPQC) and Gaussian. I’ve also developed a number of open-source computational chemistry libraries providing reusable software components, including GauXC, ExchCXX, IntegratorXX, and MACIS. Please see my Software page for an up-to-date list of my current development efforts.

From 2018-2024, I was a Scientist in the Applied Computing for Scientific Discovery Group (ACSD) of the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division (AMCR) at Lawerence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL). My research at LBNL centered around the development of exascale electronic structure methods and software targeting Leadership Computing Facilities (LCF) run by the US Department of Energy. I received my Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Washington in 2018 in the group of Xiaosong Li. My graduate research primarily centered around methods development in the field of quantum chemistry, specifically relativistic electronic structure theory and modular response theory.

For a full list of contributions, publications, presentations, and awards, please refer to my CV