Markus Dittrich

Markus received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At UIUC, he was member of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics (TCBG) group where he used molecular dynamics and combined quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical simulation approaches to study enzyme structure and function. At the TCBG he contributed to the group’s software development efforts and was a member of the system administration team helping to maintain the group’s computing infrastructure. While at the TCBG, Markus also began his stint as developer for the Gentoo Linux distribution maintaining a large number of scientific software packages. Markus then joined the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) initially as a post-doc, going through the ranks as senior scientific specialist to eventually take over the leadership of PSC’s Biomedical Applications Group as its director. At PSC, Markus had a wide range of responsibilities. He established and directed PSC’s Anton supercomputing project and led the development of the 3D reaction-diffusion code MCell. In addition, he ran a computational neuroscience lab focused on investigating synaptic structure and function in collaboration with experimentalists across the US. Markus brings to BioTeam his 15+ years of experience in computational science, software development, Linux administration and user support. His goal is to help researchers leverage computational approaches to enable new science and to maximize their productivity.