Arda Erbasan

Hello everyone! My name is Arda Erbasan, and I am 25 years old. I completed my Physics Bachelor at Middle East Technical University in Türkiye. Currently, I am studying for a Master’s in Physics at the same university. From the beginning of my Bachelor’s, I could not keep myself away from the good textbooks that show unique pieces of scientific developments. Whenever I comprehended a specific perspective related to a natural phenomenon, I could sense the exquisite details of nature and years of struggles to figure out how it works. Only then I sincerely was to admire science itself, and I decided to step up for new research experiences. Since then, I have been working on research projects!

I started my active research phase by running Density Functional Theory simulations to investigate the Single-Atom Catalysts(SACs) on metal oxide surfaces. Currently, I am exploring the Liquid Phase Metal Catalysts with Density Functional Theory and Molecular Dynamics.

I heard about the PRACE Summer of HPC within the extended application due period due to the transition to the hybrid system. As soon as I dived into the projects and format of the program, they had me with the project “Computational modeling of atomic-scale damage in irradiated metal“. I thought we were the perfect match regarding both my Physics background and research experience in Materials Science. I applied to the program and got accepted very soon. 

After the general training week on HPC, MPI, OpenMP and GPU programming, we started meeting with our supervisors, Julio and Mary Kate. They are extremely friendly, considerate, and knowledgeable researchers in their fields. They have already arranged our accounts for Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and they started to teach us LAMMPS, which we will be using throughout the project.

Keep in touch to learn more about the details of the project!