Personal Website of

Dr. Felix Sébastien Bourier

Senior Data Scientist & AI Engineer • Computational Physics

About & Portfolio

Connect & Collaborate

Felix - The Lead Engineer & Webmaster

Long before Felix entered the lab, he was a pillar of the European scripting community. Under the handle "Goti," he co-founded the ChaosScript project, which achieved over 200,000 downloads. This early deep-dive into scripting and his experiences co-founding the multigaming clan "Digitale Spielekultur" taught him how to scale software for a massive user base and to manage distributed systems - skills that now define his approach to professional data engineering and data science.

Today, Felix applies that same "hacker" mindset in his professional work. During his time as a PhD student, he transitioned from community scripting to architecting production-grade environments. At ZEISS he increased the throughput and accuracy of measurements and evaluations of metrology tool data for ultraviolet (EUV) lithography optics, ensuring that the next generation of semiconductor manufacturing is driven by robust software.

Whether he's teaching 7-year-olds at Mini-München’s Science City or representing ZEISS as a Brand Ambassador at the Alpenforum of the young chemist society (JCF), he focuses on writing useful software for the people who rely on it while continuing to work remotely.

Career Milestones

Career Milestones — Year, Role, Location and Description
Year Role Location Description
2025 - Present Speaker Remote Invited speaker and brand ambassador for ZEISS at the Alpenforum of the Young Chemist Society (JCF). The talk focused on Felix’s experience and transition from academia to industry. The sessions also involved mentoring students on their career paths. These talks led to further invitations at the HU Berlin, Hochschule Aalen, the Deutsche Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY), and at CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter.
2022 - Present Scientist Oberkochen, GER Scientist for Extreme Ultraviolet Light (EUV)-Layer metrology at Carl Zeiss SMT GmbH. Felix is responsible for automation and standardization of analysis workflows, including the introduction of coding standards, unit testing, and end-to-end ETL pipelines. He developed and deployed AI-based anomaly detection solutions on large-scale measurement data. Co-developed a Monte Carlo ray-tracing method. Pioneered the use of AI-generated images for reporting abstract physical concepts.
2018 - 2021 PhD Representative Hamburg, GER Elected student representative of the federal Cluster of Excellence CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter. Responsible for planning bi-yearly career events for PhD students and Postdocs. Elected voting member at the board of directors of the cluster management.
2017 - 2023 PhD Student, Physical Chemistry Hamburg, GER Felix's PhD Thesis: Effect of Residual Water on the Nucleation and Growth of Gold Nanoparticles in an Amine-mediated Synthesis in Organic Solvents (Magna Cum Laude). For details on the used kinetic model, explore the Kinetics Engine (FELIX) project page. The thesis has been downloaded around 1,000 times to date, a high number for a monograph in this field.
Hosting Professor: Prof. Dr. Alf Mews
2013 - 2017 Master of Science Chemistry Hamburg, GER Studies of Nanochemistry and Physical Chemistry at the University of Hamburg, which led to a publication: Influence of Interface-Driven Strain on the Spectral Diffusion Properties of Core/Shell CdSe/CdS Dot/Rod Nanoparticles. For details on the used theoretical model see the relevant field in the project area. Synthesized elongated quantum dots with extremely high quantum yields. Master Thesis: "Analysis and simulation of bond-strain in CdSe/CdS-Dot/Rods".
Hosting Professor: Prof. Dr. Alf Mews
2009 - 2013 Bachelor of Science Chemistry Hamburg, GER Studies of Biochemistry at the University of Hamburg. Bachelor Thesis: "Analysis and Improvement of the Tetramolecular Fluorescence Complementation".
Hosting Professor: Prof. Dr. Andrea Rentmeister
2009 Working Student Munich, GER Studies on genetically modified neurons on a single-cell level by computer-assisted & time-resolved (fluorescence) microscopy at Helmholtz Munich.
Hosting Professor: Prof. Dr. Timm Schroeder

Mentionable Projects & Activities

Mentionable Projects & Activities — Year, Role, Location and Description
Year Role Location Description
2025 - 2026 Developer Hamburg, GER Developed a Website SEO Auditor, a server-side diagnostic tool that deep-crawls the page. Evaluates semantic structure, keyword density, and performance metrics to assign comprehensive SEO scores.
2025 - Present Developer Hamburg, GER Developed a modular LLM Agent Orchestrator for autonomous software engineering. It features a decoupled architecture where agents are defined and configured via natural language. Results are aditionally checked and validated by an additional validator agent.
2024 - Present Developer Hamburg, GER Built the Chaos Event System, an event monitoring & analytics system with local real-time state tracking, persistent storage, and comprehensive analytics.
2023 - Present Developer Hamburg, GER Created the Chemical Chaos Engine, an interactive heuristic particle chemistry and physics sandbox in the browser. Features live, user-configurable simulations of complex molecular dynamics.
2021 - 2022 Developer Hamburg, GER Developed programmatic hyperparameter scheduling tools for Disco Diffusion to dynamically control CLIP-guidance crops (overview vs. inner cuts) during the reverse diffusion process. This mathematical schedule generator enabled precise, asymmetric scaling of global composition versus fine-detail generation over time. Also integrated these generative workflows with 3D pipelines using Cinema 4D and explored Stable Diffusion.
2018 - 2018 PhD student Hamburg, GER Development of the "Fast Equation Logical Investigation eXperiment (FELIX) toolkit. FELIX ist written in MATLAB and uses a configurable kinetic model to solve and visualize complex differential equations related to nanoparticle nucleation and growth. Empiric data for the model was obtained using a full-spectrum analytic approach of the wet-chemical system during the practical work of Felix' PhD thesis. Also performed DFT calculations for the verification of experimental data.
2018 - 2018 Freelancer Remote Worked as a freelancer on the now-defunct distributed systems project Lamden. Involved in improving the built-in atomic swap engine "Clove".
2017 Developer Hamburg, GER Trained and optimized a CUDA-enhanced Char-RNN based on the the work of Andrew Karpathy, focusing on maximizing computational throughput. To eliminate data-loading bottlenecks, a custom serialization format for MIDI compression and decompression was developed. This highly efficient preparation of the data served as the foundation for training the network on large-scale musical datasets, enabling the autonomous generation of complex, custom-made MIDI compositions.
2016 Master Student Hamburg, GER Developed the VFF Optimizer, an implementation of the Keating valence force field for wurtzite crystals in Python 3. This implementation was used for the geometry optimization of atomistically modelled nanostructures. The optimized models were then used for reduced mass band-gap calculations and the results compared to experimental spectroscopic data.
2016 Master Student Hamburg, GER Built a tool in Python 3 that takes crystallographic data from experiments and shapes different atomistic models of nanostructures from it. Obtainable shapes were: Nano-Dots, -Rods, -Cubes and -Stars. The surfaces of the created structures are finally saturated with varying surface atoms, based on the system to be studied. This is also part of the VFF Optimizer project on this page.
2010 - Present Freelancer Hamburg, GER Participant in economic science studies at the WISO-Experimentallabor of the University of Hamburg, fostering knowledge about game theory and human decision making.
2010 - 2017 Freelancer Hamburg, GER Performed market research studies for International Servicecheck / ISC-CX and other companies. Focussed on conducting surveys of test subjects and mystery shopping.
2008 Developer Munich, GER Development of a C#-based trading bot for the digital currency Klammlose. The project focused on real-time API integration, low-latency market data processing, and implementing automated execution logic.
2003 - 2017 Co-Founder Munich / Remote, GER Co-Founding and management of the multigaming Clan Digitale Spielekultur (dSk) (inactive) & the ChaosScript project (featured on the old counter-strike.de with over 200,000 downloads). Administrated the webspace, gaming and teamspeak servers for approximately 50 members. Also created custom maps for Counter-Strike.
2003 - 2005 Developer Munich / Remote, GER Development of characters and animations for the game Little Fighter 2 as part of the active community (around 50,000 downloads achieved). This early work involved optimizing sprite-based logic and reverse-engineering assets to operate within the engine’s specific constraints.
1992 Child Munich / Remote, GER At a very early age Felix began to support his grandfather with computer problems, introducing him to the famous key combination "STRG+ALT+DEL" to kill frozen programs on Windows 3.0.

Voluntary & Honorary Activities

Voluntary & Honorary Activities — Year, Role, Location and Description
Year Role Location Description
2025 - Present Co-Founder Munich, GER Co-Founder of the non-profit association Förderverein Spielstadt Mini-München e.V.. The association's primary goal is to secure additional funding to keep the Spielstadt Mini-München at its current scale and to keep it accessible and free of charge for all attendees.
2023 - Present JCF: Team Science & Education Hamburg / Remote, GER Cooperated in the development of the Chemistry Escape Room kit 'ChemEscape', which was distributed to schools free of charge, by the JCF Team Science & Education of the GDCh. The team also develops and organizes workshops and seminars on the application of AI in science and is on the verge of publishing a science communication book for children.
2005 - Present Freelancer Munich, GER Organization and supervision of scientific workshops for children in cooperation with the Deutsches Museum München and Kultur & Spielraum e.V. at various locations and events.
2003 - Present Freelancer Munich, GER Co-Teamlead of the "Science City" at Spielstadt Mini-München. Teaching science to children and adolescents (ages 7-15) through engaging presentations and hands-on experiments.