S. Davis Herring grew up in Starkville, MS, and attended undergraduate school at Mississippi State University (MSU). He earned bachelor’s degrees in physics and computer science and was inducted into the Society of Scholars. During most of his four years at MSU he worked as a programmer on WebTOP, a collaboration between his two departments, to develop pedagogical visualizations of optical phenomena. During the summers before and after his senior year, he worked as an intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) doing image analysis on proton radiography data from high explosives experiments.
Davis was awarded a Hertz Fellowship in April 2004 and entered the Department of Applied Science of the University of California, Davis, the following fall. He worked at LANL again the next summer studying radiation hydrodynamics. In March 2006, he completed his coursework and moved to Los Alamos to do graduate research at LANL. While a graduate student, he developed a new computational method for radiation transport and contributed to ongoing work in computational geometry and simulation input tools. He used molecular dynamics to study the effect of microscopic voids on high explosive sensitivity for his doctoral dissertation.
