About
#Ἀδικεῖ πολλάκις ὁ μὴ ποιῶν τι, οὐ μόνον ὁ ποιῶν τι.
He often acts unjustly who does not do a certain thing; not only he who does a certain thing.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.5
If the ultimate hubris is to strive to change the world, then it is the ultimate nobility to make a difference for good in the world. This underscores my passions and endeavours, in seeking justice, finding truth, and ultimately understanding purpose. My technical passions and abilities therefore leverage the elegance of mathematics to build computational models to simulate complex physical systems, so that I may solve problems that remain out of reach.
Experience
#Consulting
#- Acting as a Fractional CTO for clients
- Building customer solutions leveraging cloud deployments and agentic AI
Student Journey Platform
#- Creating better paths for prospective students on their education journeys by matching them with schools driven by data and intelligence
Education Sanctum
#- Dreaming of an education renaissance with quantum theory, computational philosophy, and artificial intelligence as a new education technology pedagogy
Quantum Cloud Access Project
#- Acting as the quantum computing lead on a subcontract for Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Managing quantum cloud access for researchers across New Mexico
- Democratizing user workflows through education and community outreach
- Researching new protocols for scalable quantum advantage via quantum Darwinism and quantum contextuality
GitOps Development
#High Risk Quantum Computing Research
#- Researched models, derived theory, and conducted experiments to emulate quantum circuits on D-Wave quantum annealers via the Feyman-Kitaev equivalence between adiabatic quantum computing and the quantum circuit model
Senior DevOps Engineer
2020–2022
Houston, Texas, U.S.A.
NASA Mission Telemetry Data Services
#- Prototyped a provable zero trust architecture and Kubeflow AI platform to share telemetry data from mission control with external partners
- Helped win the Mission Enabling Services Contract (MESC, C22-012)
U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project
#- Managed the ECP DevSecOps research team across all national laboratories
- Developed a zero trust infrastructure to enable secure continuous integration in a multi-cloud environment
Computer Scientist / Data Scientist
2016–2018
Santa Fe, New Mexico, U.S.A.
Geospatial satellite data refinery
#- Enriched petabytes of hyperspectral data: visible (RGB), near infrared (NIR), shortwave infrared (SWIR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
Asynchronous, event-driven scalable distributed compute
#- Constructed a task manager using Google Cloud Platform’s Pub/Sub: pipelines on 64k+ cores across managed instance groups
D-Wave quantum annealer exploration
#- Explored the D-Wave quantum annealer by bridging discrete and continuous optimization: sphere packing with local topological constraints and unequal volumes using a quadratic non-convex optimization specification
Multiphysics Eulerian code modernization
#- Developed higher order function mappings over physics kernels in order to replace core mesh iteration patterns in multiphysics Eulerian codes
Accelerated asynchronous message passing interface (MPI) facility
#- Unified cell-based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and $N$-body particle models and simulations using projective geometry and hashing: prototyped an accelerated asynchronous MPI facility
Radiation-Hydrodynamics codes at exascale
#- Researched, designed, and implemented hash-based algorithms to discretize continuous spaces into computational meshes across scalable heterogeneous architectures with primary application in radiation/hydrodynamics codes for exascale machines
Shallow water equations model simulation using cell-based AMR on GPUs
#- Developed a face recognition API, an Elm-compiled web frontend UI, and implemented machine learning algorithms including deep learning convolutional neural networks.
Education
#Dissertation: On the topology of measurement contexts for asymmetric multipartite spin systems
#- Computed degrees of non-locality of entangled qubits using algebraic topology
Adviser: Samson Abramsky
#Departmental Honors; Dean’s List
#
Publications
#Observation of quantum Darwinism and the origin of classicality with trapped ions (Quantinuum)
David Nicholaeff & Akram Touil (2026). Observation of quantum Darwinism and the origin of classicality with trapped ions (Quantinuum).
Manuscript in preparation.
Connor Aronoff, Travis Howard, David Nicholaeff, Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla, & Wade DeGottardi (2026). Identifying quantum coherence in quantum annealers.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.21355.
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.21355
QC Ware (2025, February 4). Q2B24 Silicon Valley | David Nicholaeff, Systems Research Scientist, New Mexico Consortium.
YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLSCHSTQFCc
GitLab (2020, January 15). Commit San Francisco 2020: Federation and Zero Trust CI in GitLab.
YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mOnp26Ingo
Daniela I. Moody, Steven P. Brumby, David Nicholaeff, Rick Chartrand, Mark Mathis, Justin Poehnelt, Samuel W. Skillman, & Michael S. Warren (2018). Satellite imagery analysis for automated global food security forecasting.
SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing 2018 (Proc. SPIE 10644).
https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2315960
Guillaume Julien Chapuis, David Nicholaeff, & Stephan Eidenbenz (2016). Predicting Performance of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Codes at Large Scales.
WSC ’16: Simulating Complex Service Systems.
https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC.2016.7822229
Modernizing a Legacy Physics Code
Charles Roger Ferenbaugh & et al. (2016). Modernizing a Legacy Physics Code.
Supercomputing ’16.
Fast Mesh Operations using Hierarchical and Templated Spatial Hashing: Remaps and Neighbor Finding
David Nicholaeff & Robert W. Robey (2016). Fast Mesh Operations using Hierarchical and Templated Spatial Hashing: Remaps and Neighbor Finding.
Internal Joint LANL-LLNL Conference.
Hashing in the Discrete Exterior Calculus
David Nicholaeff (2015). Hashing in the Discrete Exterior Calculus.
New Trends in Compatible Discretizations CEA-EDF-INRIA School.
Algorithms for Optimizing the Eulerian Applications Code Base for Future Computational Architectures
Robert W. Robey, David Nicholaeff, Rachel N. Robey, Patrick S. McCormick, Marion K. Davis, Adam McLaughlin, David R. Montoya, & Scott D. Pakin (2013). Algorithms for Optimizing the Eulerian Applications Code Base for Future Computational Architectures.
LA-UR Report LA-UR 13-20169.
Rachel N. Robey, David Nicholaeff, & Robert W. Robey (2013). Hash-Based Algorithms for Discretized Data.
SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
, 35(4), C346–C368.
https://doi.org/10.1137/120873686
Neal E. Davis, Robert W. Robey, Charles R. Ferenbaugh, David Nicholaeff, & Dennis P. Trujillo (2012). Paradigmatic shifts for exascale supercomputing.
The Journal of Supercomputing
, 62(2), 1023–1044.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0789-3