Michael Johnston is a Research Scientist and Manager of the Next Generation Systems team at IBM Research Ireland. His work sits at the intersection of high-performance computing, application design, and computational biophysics and biochemistry, with a focus on building and evaluating next-generation platforms that support data- and AI-driven science.
He has worked closely with the Hartree Centre—IBM’s collaboration with the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)—across projects including the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Telescope, which aims to observe the universe in unprecedented detail, and Oasis, a tool for estimating catastrophe losses. A significant part of his research has centred on materials discovery, and from 2015 to 2020 he led a team of IBM researchers developing “virtual experiments” that provide frictionless access to complex analytics and accelerate insight generation.
More recently, he has been leading research on Discovery Systems: integrated systems designed to speed up the scientific process through composable architectures, runtimes for AI surrogates of physical models, and automation and optimisation of end-to-end discovery workflows. He collaborates with his team and partners worldwide to push the performance, flexibility, and usability of scientific computing environments. Michael holds a PhD in Computational Biophysics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona.
