Computational Physicist

A computational physicist uses computers to study physical systems that are too complex, too large, too small, or too expensive to examine by experiment alone. Your day might include writing and testing simulation code, running calculations on high-performance computing clusters, analyzing the results, comparing them with experimental data, and refining the model. Applications range from modeling the climate, galaxies, and fusion energy to designing new materials, studying fluids, or simulating how drugs interact with proteins. You work closely with experimental scientists, mathematicians, and software engineers and present your findings in papers and talks.