Christopher M. Pierce
AI/ML Lead, xLight Inc.
Me, in front of the magnet from EO Lawrence's 27-inch cyclotron
(photo credit: WH McNeil)
Hello and welcome to my personal website! I am an AI/ML researcher and physicist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As part of the team at xLight Inc. I am helping to commercialize particle accelerators for use in semiconductor manufacturing. My work focuses on physical modeling and autonomous control problems that are uniquely addressed by recent advances in ML.
With nearly a decade of software engineering experience, I like to build tools to solve the problems I face in research, work, and personal life. The Photocathodes Database lists measurements on the materials I studied in PhD. Some libraries I have authored include: EasyGDF, ParetoBench, BeamFit, and Parcel. I enjoy coding challenges such as Advent of Code when I have the time.
On Github, you can find me under the name electronsandstuff where I help maintain and contribute to open source projects such as the Xopt optimization framework and LUME python libraries for accelerator simulation.
In my spare time, I enjoy photography and staying connected to my experimental physics roots with hobbyist electronics and tinkering. Check out my photo gallery.
I love getting nerd-sniped by unique technical challenges and working with great teams. Reach out if you want to find a way to collaborate!
news
| Jan 06, 2026 | My C library Parcel is now available for public use. Save and load particle data in the OpenPMD standard in your existing physics simulation tool. |
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| Jun 01, 2025 | For those with needs to estimate covariance/centroid from images of charged particle and laser beams, check out my library Beamfit available now through pip and conda ({conda, pip} install beamfit). |
| Apr 24, 2025 | Check out my latest article out now in Swarm and Evolutionary Computation. A “comparison relationship surrogate” model is shown to improve the efficiency of a multi-objective genetic optimizer. The new algorithm (CRSEA) was measured to outperform many contemporary surrogate assisted optimizers on a wide variety of biobjective, medium scale problems. Find it on the journal’s website or see its preprint available on Arxiv. |
| Dec 09, 2024 | Excited to announce the release of ParetoBench, a Python library for multi-objective optimization algorithm benchmarking. The package includes common test problems, tools for statistical analysis of convergence results, and objects for manipulating and saving results from benchmarking experiments. Go ahead and check it out on Github! |
| Oct 28, 2024 | Pleased to have contributed to “Harnessing Plasmonic Interference for Nanoscale Ultrafast Electron Sources” out now in Physical Review Letters. The work demonstrates a novel approach to creating nanoscale electron sources using plasmonic focusing, achieving sub-40 pm-rad normalized transverse emittance. |
| Aug 29, 2024 | Excited to announce the release of my new VSCode extension for the Bmad accelerator simulation environment! This extension enhances the development experience with features like syntax highlighting. Check it out on GitHub! |
| Mar 03, 2024 | On my way to Korea for the ICFA ML Applications for Particle Accelerators Mini Workshop. Come say hi to me there! |
| Dec 29, 2023 | I have completed all of the problems in Advent of Code this Year! Check out my solutions on Github. |
| Nov 21, 2023 | Our conference proceeding “Kernel Density Estimators for Axisymmetric Particle Beams” has been published! Read more about it at the publication’s website. |
| Sep 01, 2023 | I am happy to share that I am starting a new position as an accelerator physicist at a stealth startup. Looking forward to when I can share more about the exciting work we are doing! |
| Jun 19, 2023 | Excited to present my work on physics-informed surrogate modeling for accelerators at Physics and Applications of High Brightness Beams! |
| Mar 10, 2023 | Check out my latest publication in Physical Review Applied: Experimental Characterization of Photoemission from Plasmonic Nanogroove Arrays |
| Jan 25, 2023 | I just launched a website! The Photocathode Database will connect researchers with published measurements on photocathode properties. |
| Nov 02, 2022 | Say hi to me at the ICFA Beam Dynamics Mini-Workshop on Machine Learning Applications for Particle Accelerators! I am there presenting some of my work on how surrogate models can be installed into genetic algorithms and greatly improve the efficiency of multi-objective optimizations of accelerators. |
| Nov 01, 2022 | I have joined the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral scholar and will be working with Young-Kee Kim on scientific machine learning. |
| Oct 11, 2022 | The final paper of my Ph.D. is up on arXiv! This is some interesting work where we characterize, for the first time, the brightness of nanogroove enhanced photoemitters with applications for high average current photoinjectors. Check it out here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05056. |
| Oct 07, 2022 | My defense was today and I successfully presented on my thesis titled “Towards High Brightness from Photocathodes.” |
