Dhruva Kulkarni

Biographical Sketch

Dhruva Kulkarni is a computational science researcher in NERSC's Application Performance Group. Dhruva's research interests include high performance computing, experimental and applied physics, and software development. 

Before joining NERSC, Dhruva was a "Staff Software Scientist" at Thermo Fisher Scientific where he developed experiment-driven control software for triple quad mass spectrometers and FAIMS instruments. Prior to Thermo, Dhruva held dual roles at Verseon Corporation: as a 'Physicist', he primarily worked on development and single core optimization (SIMD) of a molecular dynamics program to predict protein-ligand binding energies, while as the 'Blockchain Architect', Dhruva led the design and development of the blockchain platform for the company's planned security token offering. Prior to his graduate studies, Dhruva was a 'Software Engineer' at Nevis Networks where he developed a high speed stateful traffic generator utilizing a proprietary multi-core hyperthreaded network processor.

Dhruva was awarded a Ph.D. in Physics from Clemson University in May 2017 under the guidance of Prof. Chad Sosolik for researching the transport and energy deposition characteristics of highly charged ions at the Clemon University Electron Electron Beam Ion Trap (CUEBIT) Lab as part of DARPA's Local Control of Materials Synthesis (LoCo) program. Dhruva also holds a master's degree in Physics from Clemson University, and a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from PICT, Pune University. In his spare time, Dhruva enjoys getting involved in science outreach projects, various volunteering activities and playing billiards.