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David Nicholaeff

Curriculum Vitae

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About
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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

It is the ultimate hubris to strive to change the world, but it is the ultimate nobility to make a difference for good in the world. I have always been most passionate in this endeavour, in seeking justice, truth, and ultimately understanding why we are here. My technical passion thereby lies in leveraging the elegance of mathematics to build computational models to simulate complex physical systems, that I may solve problems that remain out of reach.

Experience
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DaletN

Founder & CEO

02/18 – Present

Consulting
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  • Acting as a Fractional CTO for clients
  • Building customer solutions leveraging cloud deployments and agentic AI

Student Journey Platform
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  • Creating better paths for prospective students on their education journey by matching them with schools driven by data and intelligence

Education Sanctum
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  • Dreaming of an education renaissance with quantum theory, computational philosophy, and artificial intelligence as a new education technology pedagogy

New Mexico Consortium

Quantum Computing Lead

12/23 – Present

Los Alamos, NM

Quantum Cloud Access Project
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  • 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 metrics and protocols for scalable quantum advantage via quantum Darwinism and quantum contextuality

GitOps Development
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  • Hosting on-prem GitLab

SavantX

Mathematician

09/22 – 03/23

Santa Fe, NM

High Risk Quantum Computing Research
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  • Researched models, derived theory, and conducted experiments to emulate quantum circuits on D-Wave quantum annealers

MRI Technologies

Senior DevOps Engineer

10/20 – 08/22

Houston, TX

NASA Mission Telemetry Data Services
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  • 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)

New Mexico Consortium

U.S. Department of Energy Exascale Computing Project

10/18 – 09/20

Los Alamos, NM

U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project
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  • 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

Descartes Labs, Inc.

Computer Scientist / Data Scientist

10/16 – 02/18

Santa Fe, NM

Geospatial satellite data refinery
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  • Enriched petabytes of hyperspectral data: visible (RGB), near infrared (NIR), shortwave infrared (SWIR), and synthetic aperture radar (SAR)

Asynchronous, event-driven scalable distributed compute
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  • Constructed a task manager using Google Cloud Platform’s Pub/Sub: pipelines on 64k+ cores across managed instance groups

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Computational Physicist / Staff Scientist

06/11 – 09/16

Los Alamos, NM

D-Wave adiabatic quantum computer exploration
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  • Bridged discrete and continuous (quadratic, non-convex) optimization: sphere packing with local topological constraints and unequal volumes

Multiphysics (Eulerian) code modernization
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  • Developed higher order function mappings over physics kernels (replaced core mesh iteration patterns)

Accelerated asynchronous message passing interface (MPI) facility
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  • Unified cell-based adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and N-body particle models and simulations using projective geometry and hashing

Radiation-Hydrodynamics codes at exascale
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  • Researched hash-based algorithms to discretize continuous spaces into computational meshes and tested on heterogeneous GPU clusters

Shallow water equations model simulation using cell-based AMR on GPUs.
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Lambda Labs

Early Engineer (Employee #3)

Summer – Fall 2014

  • Developed a face recognition API, an Elm-compiled web frontend UI, and implemented machine learning algorithms including deep learning convolutional neural networks.

Education
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University of Oxford

MSc. in Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science

2014

  • 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

Publications
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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.

Assessing quantum coherence in quantum annealers

Connor Aronoff, Travis Howard, David Nicholaeff, Alejandro Lopez-Bezanilla, & Wade DeGottardi (2026).Assessing quantum coherence in quantum annealers. Manuscript in preparation.

Modernizing a Legacy Physics Code

Charles Roger Ferenbaugh & et al. (2016).Modernizing a Legacy Physics Code. Submitted to 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. JOWOG-34.

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.