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Dean E. Dauger, Ph. D., with extensive experience in science, academia, high-performance computing, and the software industry, is Founder and President of Dauger Research, Inc. He earned his B. S. in Mathematical Physics from Harvey Mudd College and his M. S. in Physics from UCLA. In March 2001, he earned his Ph. D. in Physics on Semiclassical Modeling of Quantum-Mechanical Multiparticle Systems using Parallel Particle-In-Cell Methods from UCLA. This dissertation combined an approximation of Feynman path integrals with computational methods developed for plasma simulations implemented on massively parallel high-performance computers and applied these techniques to simulating multiple interacting quantum particles, establishing a new method of physical simulation. This research used skills in Lagrangian methods, stationary phase methods, Feynman path integrals, quantum mechanics, plasma physics, numerical methods, grid-point approximations, code optimization, high-performance computing, parallel computing, visualization, sonification, verification and validation, and plasma particle-in-cell methods.
Dr. Dauger's accomplishments stem from his history. Programming since the age of nine and developing physics-based simulations since fourteen led him to a variety of experiences. While taking a one-semester hiatus from his Harvey Mudd degree, he worked for HSC Software, later known as MetaCreations, where he was one of the two original software writers of Kai's Power Tools versions 1.0 and 2.0. KPT was a set of high-performance image-processing filters for Adobe Photoshop, and KPT 2 went on to win top ratings in reviews from MacWeek and MacWorld.
He continued to hone his skills and apply them to other subjects. While finishing his B. S., he developed a rapid algorithm for simulating Fresnel diffraction patterns, which later led to his first and sole-author publication in Computers In Physics, an American Institute of Physics journal, in 1996, while he was completing his M. S. in Physics at UCLA. He implemented his Fresnel diffraction algorithms into an educational application that became a winning entry for the international Eighth Computers In Physics' Educational Software Contest.
This pursuit of understanding physics through high-performance computing continued when he developed Atom in a Box and released its 1.0 version in 1998. Besides achieving highest reviews in MacAddict, MacHome, Mac-Fan Japan, and many others, it also earned him a unprecedented second-in-a-row award in Computers In Physics' Ninth Educational Software Contest. In 2001, it still is by far the most accurate, fastest, real-time volumetric raytracing application and is in use in classrooms elementary to college in scores of institutions around the world.
Of course, he applied his talents to his doctorate, but in ways both obvious and unexpected. The computational code for his doctorate has complexities, and he applied his computational experience to the accuracy and speed of the physical simulation as well as the visualization and analysis of the simulation output for the sake of further understanding of physics. Other than the visualization, these codes were written in Fortran and in C for parallel computation because of their processing and memory demands. Some of his visualizations also involved translating evolving quantum wavefunctions to sound. | 