"I ended up really enjoying it and did the degree, followed by honours.
"My supervisor is the head of department of Computer Science and he convinced me to stay on and do my PhD with him."
Daniel earned a government-funded Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship to see him through his PhD, which he completed in an impressive two years, 11 months.
His thesis topic? "Generative programming methods for parallel partial differential field equation solvers."
Daniel does his best to explain it in layman's terms: "My real PhD contribution was to write a program that can generate code for simulations to run on a super-computer. Normally, to develop a code like this by hand would take several months."
Though Daniel and his boss use the program he devised, he's hesitant to release it as a software package as this typically leads to users demanding support programs and it becomes very time-consuming for the originator.
"It would be hard to do that in a university setting, though if we tidy it up in a few years we may get to the point where we release it."
Daniel's final thesis needed no emendations and was recommended by his examiners, so he was added to the dean's list of exceptional theses.
"When I finished my PhD, Massey were interviewing for two jobs and my supervisor recommended I apply."
He got the position as a lecturer in Computer Science. It's an unusual path for a new graduate, says Daniel. "Normally, you do a few years' post-doc, just researching and working for someone else."
He says lecturing is "a bit harder" as teaching time eats into personal research projects. He also finds in lecture theatres many of the students are a couple of years his senior.
He is also director of the university's Parallel Computing Centre, a role that entails setting direction for research and streamlining projects.
Daniel has just returned from the eResearch Symposium at Victoria University where he addressed the High Performance Computing workshop. With all these commitments he'll stay put for now, but hopes eventually to work overseas.
"If you want to do big things in high-performance computing you need to be at a university with a big budget. I'd like to be involved with designing the architecture for super-computers and seeing the real challenges involved with the machines."
While at Massey Daniel has had 32 peer-reviewed academic journal papers published and attended many overseas conferences.
"I've been to Japan, the US a couple of times, Europe, Australia and, hopefully, I'm going back to the US and Singapore later this year."
He says he's not always taken seriously.
"Everyone assumes I'm a student and some people think I don't know anything because I'm young. Some are really encouraging but others get grumpy if I try to tell them anything."
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