Hello,

I'm Sam Manzer, and I'm a Graduate Student in Martin Head-Gordon's research group at the UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry. Since I graduated college at age 18, I've been working on harnessing computational power to improve how we do chemistry. I want to push the limits of what computers can do for us. Right now, the vast majority of software only performs purely administrative tasks. Your computer can keep track of your friends, your emails, and your purchases, but what if it could do more? What if it could figure out the precise chemical structure of a new anti-cancer drug, optimize it to make it as potent as possible, and then plan a manufacturing process to bring that drug to thousands of patients? What if it could probe the most fundamental chemical processes that underly our world, from reactions in the upper atmosphere to the holy grail of photosynthesis? Scientific computing is in the process of making this vision a reality. Soon our computers will not only catalog the world we live in; they shall help us design and build a better one.

I'm a code monkey, and I love it. I dig the thrill of using all of your mental energy to build something complicated and cool. If you want to see a small sample of the stuff I've coded, check out my github.

These are a few of my favorite things:

And these are the things I hate:

  • Segfaults
  • goto statements
  • Undocumented code

That pretty much sums it up - if you want to know more, hit up my Contact page.