Karl Wilkinson obtained his degree in Chemistry at the University of Sheffield in 2005. He was awarded his PhD in Quantum Chemistry in 2008 at the University of Sheffield under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Meijer. His thesis work involved the investigation of the host-guest behavior of heterometallic metallomacrocycles using quantum mechanical methods.
He then joined Prof. Kevin Naidoo at the Scientific Computing Research Unit in the University of Cape Town until 2011 where he undertook a project to port the GAMESS-UK software package to Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). During this time he also participated in a study of the reaction mechanism of Cellobiohydrolase 1, an enzyme with application in the development of second generation cellulosic biofuels.
Karl was then in the Skylaris group as a Postdoctoral Research Associate from late 2011 till early 2014 where he worked on code and method development in ONETEP, including GPU porting, introducing OpenMP parallelisation to move the code from MPI-only to hybrid MPI-OMP parallelism, developing highly optimised algorithms for FFT box operations, and computational simulations related to the development of biofuels. After Southampton, Karl moved to the University of Cape Town in South Africa where in 2016 he was appointed as a Lecturer. From Cape Town he continued to collaborate with the Skylaris group and several of the other ONETEP developers and users and started several UK-South Africa research collaboration initiatives.
Sadly, Karl passed away on the 25th of August 2017. Karl was a bright scientist, a friend, and a continuing collaborator in the ONETEP community. We are all saddened by this great loss and we extend our most sincere condolences to his wife and family.