SOFTWARE SUSTAINABILITY INSTITUTE - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Institute in 2017 As a Research Software Engineer
- Research Software Engineer
James joined the Institute in 2017 as a Research Software Engineer (RSE) after working with the SSI on a project as part of the Open Call. In 2019, he was elected to the board of trustees for the Society of Research Software Engineering to help promote the importance of research software within the UK academic community.
His MPhil in Chemistry, awarded by the University of Southampton in 2019, focused on automating the creation of simulation models for biomolecular simulation. During this time he also worked on the ProtoMS Monte Carlo modelling package, which was accepted into the SSI Open Call, helping to ensure that simulations were reproducible across a range of target platforms.
In his role as an RSE, as well as software development and infrastructure maintenance, he advises on software engineering and design to external projects and develops and delivers training for new researchers. He also supports the Southampton Research Software Community, a community for researchers who develop software as part of their research, by running Code Surgeries and helping to launch new Special Interest Groups.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Founding Director
- Principal Investigator
Neil is the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the Software Sustainability Institute, and is based at the University of Edinburgh. He enables research software users and developers to drive the continued improvement and impact of research software, and is responsible for representing both the Institute and UK researchers at a national and international level.
Within the organisation, he oversees operations, contributes to policy development, develops and manages collaborations, and acts as the principal liaison with stakeholders. His current research interests include barriers and incentives in research software ecosystems and the role of software as a research object. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Research Software, chair of the ExCALIBUR steering committee, member of the Research Software Alliance, the BBSRC Transformative Technologies Strategic Advisory Panel and the STFC Particle Physics Technology Advisory Panel, co-chair of the Software Citation Implementation WG and FAIR for Research Software WG (FAIR4RS), co-chair of the Software Engineering for Science (SE4Science) workshop series, and co-author of "Best Practices for Scientific Computing" and "An Open Science Peer Review Oath".
Graduating with an MPhys in Computational Physics from the University of Edinburgh, he began his career at EPCC, becoming Project Manager there in 2003. During this time he led the Data Access and Integration projects (OGSA-DAI and DAIT), and collaborated in many e-Science projects, including the EU FP6 NextGRID project.
From 2007-2010, Neil was Director of OMII-UK, which provided and supported free, open-source software to the UK e-Research community. During this period, he was also Technical Manager of the JISC-funded NeISS social simulation project and the Project Manager of the JISC-funded ENGAGE initiative to undertake small, directed interventions in the development of software supporting researchers.
He is a previous chair of the EPSRC e-Infrastructure Strategic Advisory Team and the Software Carpentry Foundation, co-editor of "Software Engineering for Science", and has sat on several related advisory boards, including the EPSRC STFC SLA Steering Committee; SESC / CCPForge; HIFIS; TrustedCI; ISSF Open Research Project Board; BIS e-Infrastructure Leadership Council Software Taskforce; BBSRC ENWW-BSC People and Skills Working Group; ASEArch CCP, Future Compute, the Water Science Software Institute, and e-Research South.
Job Titles:
- Deputy Director
- Professor
Professor Simon Hettrick works with stakeholders from across the research community to develop policies that support research software, the people who develop that software and the researchers who rely on it. Simon's research focuses on the use of software in the research community with the aim of understanding practices and demographics. In this role, he conducted the first study of software reliance in academia.
Simon is a passionate advocate for Research Software Engineers. He orchestrated a campaign to gain recognition for this community, which has grown from a handful of people in 2013 to a substantial international community numbering in the thousands. He was the founding chair of the UK's Association of Research Software Engineers and is now a Trustee of the Society of Research Software Engineering and its Treasurer. He has been treasurer of the RSE conference since it began in 2016.
Simon is one of the Directors of the Southampton Research Software Group based at the University of Southampton. The group makes research software engineering expertise available to researchers across the University, provides training in software engineering and encourages collaboration and the sharing of knowledge between researchers who rely on software.
He is a member of the e-Infrastructure Strategic Advisory Team for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, a member of the UKRI talent panel college, the Projects Peer Review Panel for the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Digital & Data Infrastructures Focus Group for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Data Science Strategic advisory board for the Medical Research Council, the advisory panel for Artificial Intelligence and Informatics at the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the steering committee for the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, the steering committee for the DiRAC supercomputer, an Advisory Board member for the Society of Research Software Engineering, the MiTALENT project and the data-science journal, Patterns. He has a background in physics and patent law.
Steve leads the Institute's Research Software Group (RSG) activities to help researchers improve their research software. His PhD in Computer Science, awarded by Southampton in 2001, focused on modelling development processes to support the capture of software requirements. He also teaches Large Scale Distributed Systems as part of Southampton's BSc in Computer Science.
Steve's work at the Institute involves assisting researchers and their communities by consulting on software that is integral to their work. This includes managing the Institute's Open Calls, developing best practice guides and assessing software developed by researchers to drive improvement. He is also involved in teaching at Software Carpentry workshops as part of the Institute's training activities, having instructed at and assisted in the organisation of a dozen workshops across the UK, Europe and the US, and became a Carpentry Trainer in 2016.
Before joining the Institute, he worked as a software architect at OMII-UK and was involved in the RICES project that investigated information inconsistency problems in enterprise systems. He has also been involved in development and implementation for the Open Grid Forum, where he co-chairs two working groups in the areas of interoperability and data movement. Steve was also a workpackage leader for the IGE and OMII-Europe EU-funded projects.