Daniel Johnson, a graduating senior double majoring in engineering physics and computer science, was dubbed a 2018 Knight of St. Patrick, a high honor conferred through the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is among 11 students knighted this year by a ceremonial St. Patrick at the annual Knights of St. Patrick Ball in March.
Daniel Johnson, a Knight of St. Patrick
Siv Schwink
for Illinois Physics
Daniel Johnson, a graduating senior double majoring in engineering physics and computer science, was dubbed a 2018 Knight of St. Patrick, a high honor conferred through the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is among 11 students knighted this year by a ceremonial St. Patrick at the annual Knights of St. Patrick Ball in March.
“Being able to be the first author on two papers for two different research groups, I attribute to the great environment of learning and research at Illinois,” Johnson stresses. “I have definitely done a lot of hard work to accomplish this. But I recognize that wouldn’t have meant anything if my mentors hadn’t guided me and then set me loose. They allowed me to contribute in a real way as an undergraduate.”
Undergraduate student Daniel Johnson, Engineering Physics and Computer Science
St. Patrick knighthood recognizes student contributions to the college and demonstration of leadership and character. The knights are selected by a special committee of past knights, honorary knights (faculty members) and “Golden Shamrocks” (staff).
“This honor means a lot to me,” says Johnson. “I have worked hard to contribute to our community at Illinois over the past few years, and it shows that the College of Engineering has seen and recognizes my efforts. I’m very happy to represent the physics and computer science departments in this way.”
An unofficial part of the tradition, the knight-elects play several pranks leading up to the night of the ball.
Johnson shares, “I personally like pranks that are dumb and don’t hurt anyone. So I bought 150 fake skeleton keys and key tags. A friend and I wrote on every one of them, “Engineering Hall 206,” which is undergraduate admissions, and we dropped these all over campus.”
Johnson, who will start a doctoral program at Stanford University’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering in the fall, having received a 12-quarter fellowship, says he values the opportunities he has had to participate in research as an undergraduate at the U of I. It’s fair to say, he took these research opportunities and ran hard with them. Remarkably, he is first author on two journal articles published during his undergraduate years.
“Being able to be the first author on two papers for two different research groups, I attribute to the great environment of learning and research at Illinois,” Johnson stresses. “I have definitely done a lot of hard work to accomplish this. But I recognize that wouldn’t have meant anything if my mentors hadn’t guided me and then set me loose. They allowed me to contribute in a real way as an undergraduate.”
Last summer, working as a SPIN (Students Pushing INnovation) intern at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Johnson wrote a software program called Python Open Source Waveform ExtractoR (POWER) that has made post-processing of large-scale numerical relativity simulations on the Blue Waters supercomputer vastly more efficient. This work is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity (19 Dec 2017, v. 35, no. 2).
“POWER software is able to take black-hole-simulation results and transform the data into physical strain—the push-pull on the fabric of spacetime,” he explains.
As a SPIN intern, Johnson was mentored by Eliu Huerta, the research scientist who heads NCSA’s Gravity Group.
“Eliu is so good at shepherding students’ professional development,” affirms Johnson. “My very first day at NCSA, I was running a binary black hole simulation. And as soon as you say you want to do something, he is encouraging and guiding you. He makes sure everyone gets a lot of opportunities.
“Eliu at one point made the comment, it would be nice if we had a python program that did this, this, and this. He had the mathematical method and wanted something that would do the work within that same high-performance computing environment—so there would be less porting of data. I thought, I know some numerical methods, I can do it. And I kind of went on a coding bender. Once I get in the zone, I don’t want to stop. I have to say, I certainly couldn’t have published the paper without Eliu and the SPIN program.”
An additional first-author paper came out of an earlier research experience, working for Illinois Research Professor Daniel Andruczyk; Johnson contributed to the startup of the HIDRA plasma/fusion facility, developing the software control system for the primary instrument formerly known as WEGA, donated by the Max Planck Institute to the Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering. Johnson started this work in the spring semester of freshman year and worked through the next summer following his sophomore year. This work is published in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design (March 2018).
Johnson additionally interned at Wolfram Research the fall of his freshman year and at Garmin in the summer following his sophomore year.
Looking back over his four years at Illinois, Johnson knows he made the most of it. Pairing physics with computer science was natural for Johnson, as his research exploits attest.
“I’ve really loved being in the physics department. I especially have fond memories of my physics study group—we were just 5 friends who took several upper-division physics courses together.”
Johnson adds that his love of physics was first kindled in his junior year at William Fremd High School, in science teacher Matt Zimolzak’s class.
Johnson said he also has great memories from the various student groups he was involved with over the four years at Illinois. Highlights include volunteer work through the student service organization Volunteer Illini Projects; teaching steganography and computational physics through the Computer Science Sail program, which invites high schoolers to take a day of courses taught by undergrads; and leading tours for the College of Engineering admitted student days.
Johnson shares that his ultimate career goals are still forming, and he is keeping all options open. He is at this point most interested in the fields of cosmology, computational physics, applied math, and pure computer science.
The Knights of St. Patrick tradition came to the U of I in 1950. According to the group’s website, the tradition originally traces back to 1903 at the University of Missouri, Columbia. The story goes, students there claimed only an engineer could have accomplished the tremendous feat of driving the snakes out of Ireland, and therefore St. Patrick must have been an engineer. St. Patrick’s Day was declared a day to celebrate engineering, and St. Patrick became a symbol of honor and achievement among engineering students.