Honors College student and Physics Major Kyle Robertson graduated from the University of Vermont in 2015 wanting to change the world.  For Kyle, this means utilizing the incredible power of scalable high performance computing to attack the problem of building a better solar cell to harness the sun’s power.  While at UVM, Kyle performed research in the Del Maestro group where he used thousands of the VACC’s compute cores to study cutting edge materials derived from silicon which can support networks of one-dimensional channels with nanometer radii.  Understanding the effects of reduced dimensionality in such systems may be crucial in probing the stability of emergent confined quantum phases  and Kyle presented his work at the prestigious 2014 “Conference on Computational Physics” in Boston.

After graduating, he parlayed the cutting edge computing skills he learned at UVM  into a position at Worldcom Exchange Incorporated (http://www.wei.com/) where he helped to design and deliver a completely new virtualization system that may have significant impact on future large scale server deployments.  In Fall 2016, he started graduate work in Physics at the University of Ottawa in the Krich Lab (https://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/jkrich/)  where he is using his knowledge of low dimensional systems to study next-generation nanowire solar cells.