Desmond Kabus is a scientific software engineer and computational researcher specialising in GPU-accelerated simulation, machine learning, and data-driven modelling of cardiac electrophysiology.

He holds a dual PhD: Doctor of Science in Mathematics from KU Leuven and Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine from Leiden University Medical Center – the result of a four-year joint programme developing computational tools for the study and prediction of cardiac arrhythmias. He completed his postdoctoral research at the Mathematical Institute of Leiden University and the Laboratory of Experimental Cardiology at LUMC, where he worked alongside clinicians and cell biologists on the road towards personalised cardiac digital twins.

His background is in physics: he studied at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, earning a Master of Science with distinction, with a focus on plasma physics and computational methods. His interest in cardiac electrophysiology grew from his bachelor’s and master’s projects on numerical methods for reaction-diffusion systems, and has driven his research ever since.

During his PhD and postdoc, Desmond designed and built three production-grade open-source simulation tools – most notably Pigreads, a Python-integrated GPU-accelerated reaction-diffusion solver which he developed solo and which runs up to 25 times faster than comparable tools. These software packages are used by research groups across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. He has nine peer-reviewed publications spanning applied mathematics, computational physics, and cardiology, and has presented his work at international conferences and in clinical department meetings at LUMC.

He is now looking to bring this combination of rigorous mathematical foundations, practical software engineering, and biomedical domain expertise to industry – in scientific software engineering, machine learning for life sciences, or digital twin and simulation engineering.