Amiel Paz

I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, focused on nonadiabatic dynamics and excited-state simulation. My work includes contributing to the 2024 Journal of Chemical Physics paper on predicting the photodynamics of 200 nm excited cyclobutanone using linear-response electronic structure and ab initio multiple spawning.

I bring 7+ years of experience writing, testing, and maintaining performance-sensitive C/C++ in proprietary GPU-accelerated scientific codebases, including TeraChem. I’ve advanced excited-state and nonadiabatic molecular simulation by continuing development of TeraChem and FMS/AIMS, with a strong emphasis on analytic gradients, nonadiabatic couplings, and method robustness.

Previously, during my Ph.D. research at New York University, I authored 8 peer-reviewed publications (including 3 first-author method papers) and developed new capabilities across 2 research codebases (TeraChem and FMS/AIMS). I implemented SA-CASSCF dipole and Boys diabatic state analytical gradients for geometry optimization, developed QE gradients and nonadiabatic couplings for unprecedented excited-state dynamics of the photoexcited hydrated electron, and modified FMS/AIMS to support propagation and spawning on on-the-fly quasidiabatic electronic states—scaling workflows via parallelization and containerization (Docker, Singularity) on HPC clusters.