2020 Moderator Election

Hello, my name is Tyberius (Ty Balduf) and I'm a graduate student at the University of Kansas. I do computational chemistry research, specifically methods development for simulating chiral spectroscopy and charge transfer processes.

I think this site has the opportunity to become a great resource and hub for researchers across matter modeling disciplines. We already have a great core group of users, but there is plenty of room for the site to grow and develop. My hope is to play whatever small role I can in making that happen. I have been an active participant on the SE network for a few years now (mainly Chem SE until now) and have learned a lot about mentoring new members, shaping community policy, and keeping a site running smoothly.

I see a moderator as being both a steward and representative for what the community wants; to be entrusted with the little details and maintenance work of keeping the site running day to day, but to ultimately be working to develop the site to fit the vision of the community.

My answers to the moderator questionnaire.

My name is Ihosvany Camps. I'm Cuban-Brazilian living in Brazil and working as an Associate Professor at Federal University of Alfenas, Brazil. I own a PhD in Condensed Matter physics. My research is focused in Computational Modeling applied to condensed matter, drug design and pharmaceutical polymorphism.

I had already used molecular mechanic, semi-empiric, ab initio and DFT methods to study the electronic and transport properties of nanostructures and nanodevices; de novo drug design; molecular docking; fragment based drug design; and theoretical crystal structure predictions among other modeling techniques.

I am making my name available to the community in order to participate in the selection of moderators. I will continue putting all my experience, my time and my effort to the well functioning and growth of the forum.

Thank you very much.

Regards,

Camps

TheSimpliFire

I would like to present my candidature as pro-tempore moderator. This was quite a challenging decision for me: having much experience in moderation on SE, I thought this would be a great opportunity to help out on this site, but I am a beginner in materials (though I have a strong mathematical and statistical background).

However, I believe that being less knowledgeable in this area would not greatly impact on many moderation activities that I do. For example, I am very active in the review queues as in my opinion they are some of the best ways to refine the quality of questions. In addition, I have been a moderator on Operations Research SE for 8 months and an SE user for 3 years, so I have had much experience in tackling difficult scenarios and resolving disputes.

I am available on this site for around 4 hours per day until September, where it will be around 2 hours from September as I'll be starting my PhD in Population Health Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Answers to the questionnaire.

I really enjoyed using this newborn forum dedicated to materials modeling and learned a lot as being a small part of this wonderful community.

From the beginning of this forum, I tried my best to contribute in terms of answering the questions, reviewing the new posts, newly created tags, edits, etc. I have lots of other experiences in terms of moderating and contributing to similar other forums in StackExchange, such as Computational Science. I believe, if we work together, we could maintain and develop this community furthermore to become one of the main Q&A platforms for broader materials modeling community.

My main vision to be a moderator here in the Materials Modeling forum is to help people to develop a high-quality and inclusive community that a whole range of beginners to experts in this field could ask questions and receive high-quality answers.

I would do my best if I'll be selected to serve this community in order to bring more values into this materials modeling community by establishing a moderating plan to make sure the high-quality of answers and questions maintained while we make sure we are friendly and inclusive as much as possible.

I am Thomas, working as Assistant Professor in Physics in a college affiliated to the Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India.

My research interest is on density functional theory studies of low dimensional materials. I was part of CMS collaboration, CERN for a brief period and have research experience in the field of High Energy Physics also. I teach Quantum Mechanics and Condensed Matter Physics at the Master's level.

I had to learn DFT by myself and hence I very much appreciate the value of this community. This is a wonderful place for learning and giving. I believe that the scope of this SE is huge and we are just having a peek at the tip of the iceberg. My objective as a moderator is to see the site flourish the way the community desires and occasionally guide the community with gentle but firm interventions when deemed necessary. As I see it, the philosophy of Ubuntu should guide us, I am because we are.

Here are my answers to Election Questions

I'm taciteloquence and I'm nominating myself for moderator on the Materials Modeling Stack Exchange.

I'm a condensed matter physics postdoc specializing in both classical and quantum Monte Carlo methods for spin systems. I'm a founding member of this Stack Exchange group and I've really enjoying watching this community grow from a proposal to a large public beta.

Stack Exchange is unique among internet communities in that it rewards thoughtful questions and generous, helpful answers. As a user, I have done my best to contribute helpful and clear answers as well as interesting questions of my own. As a moderator, I would work to make sure the Materials Modeling Stack Exchange is an inclusive and kind community helps people get the answers they need. I have chosen to run in part because I think it would be useful to have a range of scientific specialties in the moderation team, and I am one of the relatively few Monte Carlo users in the forum.

If you're wondering why I am not using my real name, I find it easier to both ask and answer questions honestly when I use a pseudonym. This is for my own privacy as well as the privacy of my real-life colleagues.

Whether we model molecules, atomic clusters, 2D-materials, bulk or mesoscale systems, we believe that computational science can be transcendental. For some, the task is to develop models and algorithms to solve an interesting problem with a desired efficacy. For others, it is to implement theory into software & push simulations forward. Finally, these are applied to discover and engineer real systems to solve world problems.

Thus, it’s vital that there is a space in which all branches of matter-modeling converge and interact. My objective as a moderator would be to continue the efforts in maintaining an inclusive, multi- and interdisciplinary site. To help solidify this as THE forum of choice the field. This, by gaining the trust of novice and advanced members, ensuring that all Qs get the deserved attention & As of the highest quality. Additionally, I will communicate regularly with the community to ensure the site is headed in the right direction.

My true college was SE, and I'm honored to be here NOW.

Thank you!

More on my commitment and experience here, the CCMC here