I write and run simulations of the plasma a laser drives off a target, in C on UAB’s Cheaha supercomputer, for a physics lab that grows thin films with lasers and machine learning.
Undergraduate Researcher, Computational Plasma Physics · Computational plasma physics research group, UAB Department of Physics
Laser meets target
One pulse
A stylized pulse strikes an aluminum target and a plume swells from the spot, then fades.
Project: Laser-generated plasmas in length scales relevant for thin film growth and processing: simulation and experiment.
Write and run coupled laser-ablation and fluid-dynamics simulations of laser-generated plasmas in C with the Basilisk PDE framework.
Run workloads on UAB’s Cheaha supercomputer; learned Linux and Bash from scratch to manage HPC jobs, environments and data.
Work with synthetic plasma datasets in which plasma temperature (T) and ionization fraction (Xe) serve as ground truth for testing ML models.
Write Python scripts that process, visualize and analyze simulation output into the plots and comparisons the team uses to evaluate models.
Support research on ML-guided pulsed laser deposition (PLD), where Gaussian Process Bayesian Optimization builds surrogate models of plasma conditions from a small number of experiments.
Accepted for an oral presentation · AVS 72nd International Symposium · Pittsburgh, Nov 8–13, 2026
Across 1,000 independent trials, the model found optimal plasma conditions in as few as three adaptive iterations: a step toward autonomous, real-time control of thin-film growth.