Berhane Temelso is a senior high-performance computing (HPC) system administrator and research scientist at College of Charleston (CofC). He is a computational chemist by training and he has worked as a postdoctoral fellow, research scientist and HPC system administrator with George C. Shields and MERCURY consortium at Furman University, Bucknell University and Armstrong Atlantic University for many years prior to moving to CofC. He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from Berea College in Berea, KY, USA and Ph.D. in computational chemistry from Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, USA under the supervision of C. David Sherrill. His Ph.D. work explored the ability of the most rigorous first-principles computational methods to reproduce molecular properties derived from experiment.
Dr. Temelso's research mainly focuses on the application of efficient computational methods to understand the structure and dynamics of hydrogen-bonded systems ranging from water clusters to atmospheric aerosols. He collaborates with experimental groups to solve interesting problems like the structure of small water clusters and the formation rates of sulfate atmospheric aerosols whose cooling effect on the global climate is significant, but poorly understood.
In his role as an HPC system administrator, he maintains HPC clusters and provides research computing support to users. His current efforts are focused on expanding HPC access and utilization to a larger number of disciplines by incorporating more user-friendly interfaces.