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Erick Schulz

Computational science engineer with a PhD in mathematics, experienced in scientific software development, numerical simulation, AI integration and leadership.

[email protected] Zurich, CH erickschulz erick-schulz

Experience

Plexim GmbH

Zurich, Switzerland
Head of Scientific Software Development 2024 - now
Team Lead, Research Scientist 2023 - 2024
Scientific Software Developer 2022 - 2023
  • Built the native AI integration of PLECS for agentic analysis, creation and simulation of multi-physics schematic models, with an MCP server and an in-app assistant (ACP).
  • Led the development of PLECS Spice, a circuit solver for semiconductor device-level simulation, written from scratch in C++ and released in 2025 (€1M EU grant, PowerizeD).
  • Developed a novel parameter identification method for thermal networks and numerical schemes for real-time FPGA simulation (RT Box).
  • Built the CLI Plexim developers use to run coding agents in isolated microVMs.
  • Lead a team of seven scientists and engineers and give technical workshops at leading semiconductor manufacturers internationally. Won a second €1M EU grant for the development of AI tools dedicated to power electronics (Moore4Power, 2026).

ETH Zurich

Zurich, Switzerland
Lecturer (part-time) 2026 - now
  • Teach Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations, a core course of the CSE program and part of the first generation of mandatory ETH courses graded by AI (STIFT+).

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

Cambridge, USA
Research Intern 2017
  • Built a Levenberg-Marquardt optimizer to fit surrogate models of large HVAC systems.

Open source

2019 - now NumPDE C++ codebase of the ETH course, 100+ simulation algorithms. Maintainer
2026 - now LLMQore Qt/C++ library for LLM, MCP and ACP clients. Contributor
2025 thermal-network Fitting thermal networks to impedance data. Author

Education

ETH Zurich

Zurich, Switzerland
PhD, Applied Mathematics 2018 - 2022
  • Numerical methods for electromagnetism (finite and boundary elements). Thesis on boundary integral equations for Hodge operators (Laplace, Dirac) on manifolds.

McGill University

Montreal, Canada
M.Sc., Applied Mathematics 2016 - 2018
  • First convergence proof and solver implementation for discrete exterior calculus (DEC).
B.A., Honours Mathematics and Computer Science 2012 - 2016
  • First Class Honours. Built a lattice gauge theory solver in C for the Yang-Mills equations.

Awards

  • Nominated for the ETH Medal 2022
  • Graduate Excellence Fellowship, McGill University 2017
  • NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award 2015

Skills

  • AI and agents: MCP, ACP, tool design for LLM agents, agentic coding
  • Programming: C++/Qt, Python (NumPy, SciPy), MATLAB
  • Numerics: Modeling, ODE/DAE/PDE solvers, FEM/BEM, sparse linear algebra, optimization
  • Languages: English and French (both native)

Publications

  1. E. Schulz, C. Strössner, C. Grötzbach. Identifiability of Cauer thermal networks. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2026. Accepted for publication.
  2. E. Schulz, R. Hiptmair. Boundary element exterior calculus. In progress.
  3. E. Schulz, R. Hiptmair, S. Kurz. Boundary integral exterior calculus. Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 2025.
  4. E. Schulz, A. T. S. Wan. Minimal ℓ² norm discrete multiplier method. Journal of Computational Dynamics, 12(2), 212-238, 2025.
  5. R. Hiptmair, D. Pauly, E. Schulz. Traces for Hilbert complexes. Journal of Functional Analysis, 284(10), 2023.
  6. M. Kirchhart, E. Schulz. Div-curl problems and H¹-regular stream functions in 3D Lipschitz domains. Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences, 45(3), 1097-1117, 2022.
  7. E. Schulz, R. Hiptmair. Coupled domain-boundary variational formulations for Hodge-Helmholtz operators. Integral Equations and Operator Theory, 94(1), 2022.
  8. E. Schulz, R. Hiptmair. First-kind boundary integral equations for the Dirac operator in 3-dimensional Lipschitz domains. SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, 54(1), 616-648, 2022.
  9. E. Schulz, R. Hiptmair. Spurious resonances in coupled domain-boundary variational formulations of transmission problems in electromagnetism and acoustics. Computational Methods in Applied Mathematics, 22(4), 971-985, 2022.
  10. E. Schulz, G. Tsogtgerel. Convergence of discrete exterior calculus approximations for Poisson problems. Discrete & Computational Geometry, 63, 346-376, 2020.

Abstracts and links are on the Publications page.