Biography
Don Willcox is a senior research scientist within IACS working on Scientific User Support and Engagement. Don earned a PhD in Physics at Stony Brook University in 2018 in the area of computational astrophysics. Don then joined Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as a postdoc developing time integration, adaptive mesh refinement, and GPU solvers for a variety of scientific application codes. Don left LBNL as a project scientist in 2024 at the end of the DOE Exascale Computing Project. He worked as a scientific software developer in industry before joining IACS to help launch the Stony Brook Supercomputing Center.
Research
Don's research primarily focuses on modelling the nuclear and particle physics in high-energy astrophysical events involving compact objects.
One of the original developers of the pynucastro community code for building nuclear reaction networks, he developed GPU-accelerated network solvers for use in the AMReX suite of astrophysical hydrodynamics codes. Don has also worked on accelerating these computations with surrogate models and published machine learning models for nuclear reactions involving carbon fusion.
Don has applied these techniques to high performance simulations studying thermonuclear supernovae and X-ray bursts from neutron stars. Following this work, he developed the Emu high performance code for solving three-flavor neutrino quantum kinetics in three dimensions with arbitrary angular resolution. Emu is a new open-source code that enables detailed studies of neutrino fast flavor instabilities in core collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers. Predictions made with Emu have important implications for the nucleosynthesis processes that generate heavy elements in these astrophysics events.
Don is interested in connecting neutron star observations with fundamental physics and in computational techniques for solving the required multi-scale, multi-physics challenges. He is also interested in interdisciplinary opportunities to apply high performance computing in fields outside astrophysics.