Personal Communications Vol. 1 · Rev. 2026

Michael H. Prince

Software Engineer, Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory

(Received continuously; accepted with minor revisions)

Abstract — His work is a mix of scientific software engineering and machine learning research with engineering efforts across GUI development, data pipelines, and HPC-scale analysis code. His research interests include foundation models, AI agents, and data-driven methods for accelerating scientific work and extracting insight from large-scale datasets. (He notes that he is very easily nerd-sniped.) Correspondence via GitHub, LinkedIn, or Google Scholar.

Fig. 1. Live stylized simulation, SrTiO3 with polychromatic beam. The specimen may be reoriented by dragging.

Background

Prior to Argonne, the author worked in SaaS development as an undergraduate co-op and contributed to small satellite flight software development. During graduate school he worked on evolutionary computing applied to DOE advanced manufacturing.

References

  1. Andrejevic, N., Du, M., Sharma, H., Horwath, J. P., Luo, A., Yin, X., Prince, M. et al. AlphaDiffract: automated crystallographic analysis of powder X-ray diffraction data. arXiv 2603.23367 (2026). arXiv
  2. Sainju, R., Dariusz, J., Shang, H., Prince, M., Aydelott, R., Cherukara, M., Sun, Y. et al. APS-RAG: a domain-aware hybrid retrieval augmented generation system for accelerator operations and knowledge synthesis. (In preparation.)
  3. Vriza, A., Prince, M. H., Zhou, T., Chan, H. & Cherukara, M. J. Operating advanced scientific instruments with AI agents that learn on the job. npj Computational Materials 12, 160 (2026). Article · arXiv
  4. Prince, M. H., Chan, H., Vriza, A., Zhou, T., Sastry, V. K., Luo, Y., Dearing, M. T. et al. Opportunities for retrieval and tool augmented large language models in scientific facilities. npj Computational Materials 10, 251 (2024). Article · arXiv
  5. Prince, M., Gürsoy, D., Sheyfer, D., Chard, R., Côté, B., Parraga, H., Frosik, B. et al. Demonstrating cross-facility data processing at scale with Laue microdiffraction. SC'23 Workshops (2023). Article
  6. Prince, M. H., DeHaan, K. & Tauritz, D. R. A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm approach for optimizing part quality aware assembly job shop scheduling problems. EvoApplications (2021). Preprint · Article
  7. Prince, M. H., McGehee, A. J. & Tauritz, D. R. EDM-DRL: toward stable reinforcement learning through ensembled directed mutation. EvoApplications (2021). Preprint · Article

Grad Student Descent Is All You Need