my name is Philipp, I'm a PhD student from Germany working on MD simulation of epigenetic enzymes. I don't know if this messages will ever be read (there was only one mail address findable and I didnt know if my mail would have directly been gone to spam, so I chose this way), but I really want to say thank you.
I started about 1.5 years ago with MD simulation and OpenMM as the engine, even though GROMACS was the standard back then in our group. By studying the manual and the tutorials I was able to pick up the code to start with and was able to launch my first simulation in only a couple of days. I got eager and started to try more things, which evnetually resulted in more error messages I could not overcome. I finally reached out to the OpenMM github (with a different github acc.) and very quickly got really competent and user friendly answers, by someone called peastman.
I read the main OpenMM publication from 2010 and saw the name Peter Eastman, but somehow didn't connect it to the github user. When I started to realize, that in the Github issue, I was texting with THE Peter Eastman, I was overwhelmed and just extremely excited.
I genuinely admire your work on OpenMM. I've been working with the code eversince I started my Master Thesis and always come to the conclusion that this is just and awesome piece of work.
But what I admire even more is how you interact with people. In the beginning, I had some really REALLY dumb questions, but you truly tried to help me overcome my simple problems. This engagement made me continue to work with OpenMM, even when I sometimes had difficult times with it.
I honestly don't want anything from you, except that you stay as you are. It seems like you love your research and even more when people profit from it and get a benefit out of it. And this is really rare these days imo. You have build a platform from which great achievements are possible and made it usable for everyone (if they have a good GPU at least :D).
I should have written this way earlier, because such a scientific attitude is remarkable. Maybe for you helping others so comitted is not such a big thing for you, and I can only speak for myself, but it meant a lot to me.
To one of the most respectable, competent and dedicated scientists I know, to you Peter.
Sincerely and full of humility,
Philipp
Btw, our whole group now uses OpenMM.
P.S. I am still working on the 'Analyse which atoms causes - particle coordinate is nan' Issue. Update on this will follow shortly. Will post the solution, which worked for me in the corresponding issue.
peastman
commented
2 years ago
Dear Peter Eastman,
my name is Philipp, I'm a PhD student from Germany working on MD simulation of epigenetic enzymes. I don't know if this messages will ever be read (there was only one mail address findable and I didnt know if my mail would have directly been gone to spam, so I chose this way), but I really want to say thank you.
I started about 1.5 years ago with MD simulation and OpenMM as the engine, even though GROMACS was the standard back then in our group. By studying the manual and the tutorials I was able to pick up the code to start with and was able to launch my first simulation in only a couple of days. I got eager and started to try more things, which evnetually resulted in more error messages I could not overcome. I finally reached out to the OpenMM github (with a different github acc.) and very quickly got really competent and user friendly answers, by someone called peastman. I read the main OpenMM publication from 2010 and saw the name Peter Eastman, but somehow didn't connect it to the github user. When I started to realize, that in the Github issue, I was texting with THE Peter Eastman, I was overwhelmed and just extremely excited.
I genuinely admire your work on OpenMM. I've been working with the code eversince I started my Master Thesis and always come to the conclusion that this is just and awesome piece of work. But what I admire even more is how you interact with people. In the beginning, I had some really REALLY dumb questions, but you truly tried to help me overcome my simple problems. This engagement made me continue to work with OpenMM, even when I sometimes had difficult times with it.
I honestly don't want anything from you, except that you stay as you are. It seems like you love your research and even more when people profit from it and get a benefit out of it. And this is really rare these days imo. You have build a platform from which great achievements are possible and made it usable for everyone (if they have a good GPU at least :D).
I should have written this way earlier, because such a scientific attitude is remarkable. Maybe for you helping others so comitted is not such a big thing for you, and I can only speak for myself, but it meant a lot to me.
To one of the most respectable, competent and dedicated scientists I know, to you Peter.
Sincerely and full of humility,
Philipp
Btw, our whole group now uses OpenMM.
P.S. I am still working on the 'Analyse which atoms causes - particle coordinate is nan' Issue. Update on this will follow shortly. Will post the solution, which worked for me in the corresponding issue.