Nikhil Prabhu

🙏 Hello and welcome to my little corner of the internet.

Here you will find the parts of my professional journey that never quite fit into a formal CV: the stories and think-out-loud ideas behind my research and publications, and the curiosities that keep me engaged as a researcher.

I am originally from India, where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. Curiosity (and an arguably optimistic trust in Scandinavian winters) took me to Sweden for a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering. I graduated in the middle of the pandemic, an unusual time to wrap up a degree, but also a moment that pushed me toward my next big step. That step turned out to be Belgium.

I moved to Belgium to pursue a PhD in Computational Materials Science at KU Leuven, working closely with the wonderful minds behind DAMASK Multiphysics. Today, I am a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Departments of Computer Science and Materials Engineering, still deeply immersed in the world of computational materials science.

My research interests lie in developing and using numerical tools to understand how materials behave across scales and environments, together with the steady flow of computational puzzles that keep me on my toes. They appear regularly, and I genuinely enjoy solving them.

I also enjoy digging into the mechanics behind material behavior while staying committed to keeping my work open and accessible so it can help push science forward. For the sake of reproducibility, you can access the computational workflows of my papers, which are archived on open access platforms.

I hope this webpage gives you a better picture of what I do. Thanks for stopping by! 🙏