Filipe Maia

Biographical Sketch

As one of NERSC's new Petascale Initiative Postdoctoral Fellows, Filipe Maia will be helping the Advanced Light Source's Stefano Marchesini accelerate biological imaging codes and Earth Sciences Division's Gregory Newman accelerate geophysical imaging codes, with graphics processing units (GPUs).

For his doctoral thesis, Maia reconstructed images from X-ray diffraction patterns. "This is a very computationally intensive process that I accelerated using GPUs," he says.

A native of Portugal, Maia's interest in computing sparked just after high school when he created a chess playing engine that required both clever algorithms and optimized codes. He pursued an undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Porto University, just outside of his Portuguese hometown. He then migrated to Uppsala, Sweden to pursue a doctorate in physics. In his spare time, Maia enjoys cooking, reading, traveling and surfing the internet for information.