LERO-ICHEC member, Dr. Cathal Ó Broin, has won an Institute of  Physics (IoP) award for best thesis in Computational Physics. The yearly prize is awarded from the Computational Physics group (CPG) committee of the IoP.  They award the prize for the thesis which they believe contributes most strongly to the advancement of computational physics.

Cathal's thesis work focussed on developing code to quickly solve the dynamics of intense, ultrashort lasers interacting with atoms and molecules. The work had two major strands. Firstly, he applied time-dependent variation of R-matrix theory to molecules for the first time. Concurrently with that work, he offloaded his calculations on graphics cards using OpenCL to significantly speedup calculations. Cathal's thesis was supervised by Dr. Lampros Nikolopoulos of Dublin City University.

Cathal is a researcher in LERO where he is developing a library for extreme-scale high-performance data access for Oil & Gas seismology in collaboration with Tullow Oil plc and DataDirect Networks and led by Dr. Michael Lysaght.

Cathal will be speaking about his thesis and current work in the UK at a joint British Computer Society (BCS) and IoP CPG event on the 29th of September.