Benjamin Thorne
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Lead Engineer · Atomic Industries · San Francisco

Benjamin Thorne

I build optimization and machine-learning systems grounded in physics. At Atomic Industries I lead the team that turns customer CAD into manufacturable injection-mould tooling — computational geometry, thermal simulation, and large-scale optimization in one pipeline.

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Portrait of Benjamin Thorne
Role
Lead Engineer, Atomic Industries
Since 2023 · previously Senior MLE
Based
San Francisco, California
Julia · Python · CUDA · HPC
Training
PhD, Astrophysics
Oxford · Princeton · Kavli IPMU

Selected work

Four of many

Systems I designed and built, from GPU geometry kernels to distributed optimizers and public research software.

Atomic Industries · 2023—

Automated tooling design

I lead the team building the platform that takes customer CAD through to manufacturable injection-mould tooling. The internal work is not public; the short version is computational geometry, GPU compute and large-scale optimization applied to a hard physical design problem.

Julia Python CUDA
UC Davis · Berkeley · 2020—2022

Differentiable cosmology

An automatically differentiable foreground extension to CMBLensing.jl, accelerated with CUDA.jl. Sparse approximations and preconditioners cut the cost of a log-likelihood evaluation by roughly 100×, making inference across tens of A100 nodes practical.

Julia CUDA Autodiff
Paper
Berkeley Lab · NeurIPS 2024

FAIR Universe

Coordinated a ten-plus person collaboration across Berkeley Lab, University of Washington, Paris-Saclay and ChaLearn to build uncertainty-aware machine-learning benchmarks for high-energy physics, served on the Perlmutter supercomputer.

Python PyTorch Kubernetes
Paper Project
Open source · 2017—

Python Sky Model

The de facto standard simulation package for the microwave sky, with 300+ citations. Used by the Simons Observatory, CMB-S4 and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope; now maintained by the Pan-Experiment Galactic Science group.

Python Numba MPI
GitHub Paper

Background

2011 — present
2023 — present
Lead Engineer
Atomic Industries · San Francisco
Lead a small engineering team building the platform that converts customer CAD into mould architecture, cooling circuits and simulation-ready tooling.
2023
Machine Learning Engineer
NERSC, Berkeley Lab · Berkeley
Scientific machine learning and containerised workloads on the Perlmutter supercomputer.
2019 — 2022
Postdoctoral Researcher
UC Davis · Davis
Differentiable simulation, generative modelling and Bayesian inference for cosmology, distributed across tens of A100 nodes.
2015 — 2019
PhD, Astrophysics
Oxford · Princeton · Kavli IPMU
Cosmic Microwave Background analysis under Prof. Jo Dunkley, as an Oxford–Kavli IPMU fellow.
2011 — 2015
MPhys & BA, Physics
New College, Oxford
Academic scholar. First-class honours, specialising in theoretical physics and astrophysics.
Open to conversations about hard computational problems.

Simulation, optimization and machine learning for physical systems — especially where the geometry is unforgiving and the loop is expensive.

Email ben0x1@icloud.com LinkedIn /in/b-thorne GitHub @b-thorne Google Scholar Publications Résumé HTML · PDF

© 2026 Benjamin Thorne

 
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