Alex Thom is a Royal Society Research Fellow in the University of Cambridge, and a Director of Studies in Physical Natural Sciences at Magdalene College. His research interests are in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, specializing in method and software development.

Current projects involve the calculation of accurate electronic energies using Monte Carlo techniques, the description of excited states of medium-large molecules using new methodology, and investigation of the electronic structure of molecules using localized orbital techniques.

I am also a developer of the HANDE QMC package (version 1.4 released February 2019) which (amongst many features) performs Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte Carlo and Coupled Cluster Monte Carlo on molecular and solid-state systems, and am happy to be contacted with questions about using this or potential applications.

As part of the EXTRA Consortium, we are looking at the development processes involved in writing scientific software on modern reconfigurable architectures (principally FPGAs), and currently have projects implementing Quantum Monte Carlo methods on these architectures.

PhD Positions

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in my group, please contact me by email.  I am part of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Computational Methods for Materials Science which will have some PhD positions available early in the new year.  Some past example projects can be found here.