Brandon Barker, Ph.D.

Brandon Barker is a software engineer and computational astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics. His work focuses on scientific software, high-performance computing, and numerical methods for astrophysics, with particular interests in high order methods, radiation hydrodynamics, and supernova modeling. Before joining Flatiron, he was a Metropolis Computational Physics Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory specializing in scalable, portable methods for modeling high energy density plasmas. He earned dual Ph.D. degrees in Astrophysics and in Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering from Michigan State University as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. In addition to research software development, he is interested in scientific software stewardship, education, and building sustainable computational tools for research.