ESCIENCE CENTER - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Netherlands EScience Center As Senior Software Engineer
- Senior Research Software Engineer
Abel Soares Siqueira has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from the State University of Campinas, Brazil, during which he worked on the extension of an optimization method for inequality constraints.
In late 2014, he became an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department at the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil. In that position, he became interested in reproducible research inside the nonlinear optimization field, which led to the creation of the JuliaSmoothOptimizers (JSO) GitHub organization. JSO consists of packages to support the development of optimization methods in the Julia language. It helps the researcher to prototype, test, benchmark, and publish the results with ease.
He's also been interested in data science and machine learning since 2018. He helped create and manage an activity group in Brazil for students and practitioners called CiDAMO, which promotes monthly online meet-ups and has a yearly week-long event.
Since 2010, he has been involved in workshops and training camps like those of Software Carpentry, teaching mainly Git or Bash. Since 2020, he has focused that creative energy on producing YouTube videos (https://www.youtube.com/AbelSiqueira) primarily about the Julia language.
Abel joined the Netherlands eScience Center as Senior Software Engineer in the summer of 2021.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Alessio studied Computer Science at the University of L'Aquila (Italy), where he obtained a bachelor's and master's (cum laude) degrees. He also obtained a master's in Computer Science from Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, he developed an interest in high-performance and parallel computing and began working with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) during his master's project.
After graduation, he worked for over a year as a researcher at the VU exploring the acceleration of radio astronomy algorithms. He later started a PhD at the VU on the topic of accelerating radio astronomy algorithms using many-core accelerators and auto-tuning.
During his PhD, he also spent a year working as a Scientific Programmer at ASTRON, the Netherlands institute for Radio Astronomy, contributing to the real-time pipeline for ARTS, the Apertif Radio Transients System. He defended his PhD at the VU in 2017.
Alessio joined the Netherlands eScience Center in February 2017. In 2019, he spent three months as a visiting scholar at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer With a Background in AI
Alexander Hadjiivanov is a Research Software Engineer with a background in AI, linguistics and physics. He completed his PhD in AI at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2019, where he focused on neuroevolution and adaptive learning. Afterwards, he worked as Head of Research for a Sydney-based startup before moving to the Netherlands to join the ESA Advanced Concepts Team (ACT) as an internal research fellow in AI. At the ACT, Alex worked on neuromorphic computing and vision for space applications as well as multidisciplinary projects spanning everything from biomimetics to graph theory. Over the past several years, he has been developing models of the mammalian retina and homeostatic learning for spiking neural networks. Alex is fascinated by neuroscience as well as both natural and programming languages, and he welcomes questions, opinions and debates on topics from the nature of learning and perception to generative grammar and etymology.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Angel studied Computer Systems Engineering at Tecnológico de Monterrey, and a MSc in Computer Science at Instituto Politécnico Nacional. He worked as a web and mobile developer and as a data scientist in the industry for several years in Mexico City. He then obtained a PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He also worked for three years as a postdoc at the VU Amsterdam, where he participated in the InTaVia project, contributing with natural language processing methods for complementing a knowledge graph that comprised a subset of Europe's cultural history, including data on individual artists, cultural objects, and groups or organizations.
Angel joined the eScience Center in January 2024 as a Research Software Engineer.
Arjan has been working in financial positions for commercial companies for more than 20 years. In the past, he also worked as a project manager for the government, banks and insurance companies, mainly as a leader for large teams in administrative projects. Most of his working time he spent in the Amsterdam area, and studied Management, Economics and Law in Haarlem.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Bart studied Civil Engineering and Watermanagement, and has a PhD in Hydrology from Delft University of Technology. During his PhD he focused on the measurement of evaporation and heat fluxes in forests using Distributed Temperature Sensing. As this technique produces many gigabytes of (raw) measurement data per day, both the analysis and calibration of the measurement data required extensive use of Python. As a result of this, he published the ‘dtscalibration' python package together with his colleague Bas des Tombe. As a Postdoc he managed fieldwork and data collection to study the prevention of fruit crop loss due to frost, as part of the "FruitFrost" project.
Driven by his previous experiences in collaborative programming, and a general interest in computer science, Bart joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in the Environment & Sustainability Section in June 2022.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Scientist
Bjorn Stevens is a renowned climate scientist and meteorologist who is currently director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and a professor at the University of Hamburg. He received his PhD in atmospheric science from Colorado State University and has made significant contributions to understanding the role of aerosols, clouds and atmospheric convection in the climate system. Stevens was one of the authors of the chapter on clouds and aerosols in the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report and has received numerous awards for his work. He is also the joint lead coordinator of the World Climate Research Programme's Grand Challenge on Clouds, Circulation and Climate Sensitivity and chairs the Climate Change committee of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards.
Brit studied Sports, Management and Business in Amsterdam. After her study, she begain working as an Events Manager for Amref Health Africa, the largest African health organization, where she lead large projects to raise funds. During her years at Amref, she also joined the Works Council (OR) where she gave advice on and approved varies human resource policies, strategy and organization structure.
In June 2024, Brit joined Netherlands eScience Center as Operations Coordinator.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Carsten studied Computational Linguistics and Applied Computer Science at the University of Heidelberg and Speech & Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. He worked as a research software engineer for the "Institute for the German Language" (IDS Mannheim) and for the UKP Lab at the TU Darmstadt. His academic focus lies on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and their applications in inter-disciplinary projects.
Carsten worked in R&D labs of different companies with a focus on making NLP, Information Retrieval, and recommender systems applicable for companies in domains including HR, knowledge management, and education technology.
Aside from that, Carsten investigates the interaction between technology and society, and engages in projects that aim to develop infrastructure for a better internet, fostering dialogue between philosophers, journalists and technologists. He has been an author and editor for different Linux and Open-Source publications for many years. about technological infrastructures, with a practical approach.
Carsten has joined the eScience Center in 2022 with the ambition to develop research software with industry standards for inter-disciplinary academic research projects as well as for the rest of the open-source world.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Professor of Biological Developmental Psychology
Chantal Kemner is full professor of Biological Developmental Psychology in Utrecht at the faculty of Social Sand Behavioural Sciences. She is the scientific director of the YOUth cohort. She is a VIDI and VICI laureate. Between 2012 and November 2023 she was the scientific director of the Consortium Individual Development, a consortium of Dutch researchers that obtained the prestigious gravitation grant of the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO). Chantal Kemner studied Biological Psychology and obtained her PhD (in 1992) in Utrecht, at the department of Psychopharmacology. Thereafter she worked as a postdoc, and later as senior researcher, at the department of Child Psychiatry at the University Medical Centre Utrecht (UMCU). Between 2003 and 2008 Chantal Kemner was appointed as a (part-time) full professor at Maastricht University, and between 2013 and 2021 at the UMCU
Job Titles:
- Netherlands EScience Center As a Research Software Engineer
- Research Software Engineer
Christiaan has studied Psychology, Physics and Artificial Intelligence, all at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Christiaan received his master's in both Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, track Intelligent Systems. In his thesis, he applied reinforcement learning to the problem of learning new behaviour in the field of robotics. His specialties include machine learning, pattern recognition, computer vision and reinforcement learning.
During and after his study, he worked at Conclusion Learning Centers developing a Learning Management System (LMS). For this system, he developed various new functionalities which include a recommender system that recommends users products based on their previous behaviour and setting up new catalog search functionality using Elastic Search.
In 2013, Christiaan joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer to work on the eEcology project.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Claire has a PhD in Glaciology from the University of Bristol, where she focused on modelling the Northern Patagonian Icefield using the ice sheet model BISICLES. She used mass conservation methods to derive ice thickness and used this to investigate piedmont lobe collapse in Patagonia and whether current glacier thinning rates there could be partially explained. During her PhD, she also worked part-time as a data scientist, assessing maritime risks and detecting suspicious vessel activity.
She moved to the Netherlands in 2021 to work as a research scientist at KNMI, working on coupling the Antarctic ice sheet into the Earth System Model EC-Earth. In November 2023, she joined the eScience Center to work on geospatial data in the Environment and Sustainability section, where she has also developed an interest in machine learning.
Job Titles:
- Programme Director
- Programme Director of the Netherlands
Since March 2023, Colette is the programme director of the Netherlands eScience Center. As programme director, her main responsibility is the call strategy and the supervision of its implementation. For this, she works closely with the Programme Managers. She also contributes to the general management of the eScience Center in the directors team and to external relations of the Netherlands eScience Center.
Colette obtained her PhD at Utrecht University, with research on how scientists connect their work to large societal goals in science policy. After that, she moved to NWO, where she worked as a coordinator on the development of the Dutch National Research Agenda (Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, NWA) and as management board member in the European Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe. This was followed by two years as board secretary at the Mathematics department of Utrecht University, where she contributed to strategy and policy development and implementation of the department and where she managed operational matters.
Job Titles:
- a Research Software Engineer
- Research Software Engineer
Dani is a cell biologist by training and spent about 15 years as an academic on quantitative cell biology and biophysics.
He did his PhD work at the Gulbenkian Science Center outside Lisbon, studying cell division and epigenetics. One key discovery he made was to determine the molecular copy number of a key protein at the centromere, responsible for accurate cell division. For this, he developed algorithms to automatically detect, and measure diffraction limited fluorescent signals from microscopy images.
In 2015, Dani started a postdoc at University College London on the biomechanics of confined cell migration. Here he developed microfabricated environments, microscopy protocols, and data analysis workflows, allowing him to quantify cell behavior in confinement.
In 2019, he started a second postdoc and at the Hubrecht Institute in Utrecht, working once again on cell division, this time on chromosome segregation. he was heavily involved in microscopy data analysis for various ongoing projects and developed, among other things, pipelines for visualizing 4-dimensional (3D+time) microscopy data and for scoring phenotypes from microscopy images.
Dani joined the eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in September 2022, working in the Life Sciences section.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
Dieter A. Kranzlmüller is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and a professor of computer science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. Kranzlmüller has a background in the IT sector, and has held positions at various universities including Reading, Dresden and Lyon. His research interests include grid and cluster computing, system programming, innovative IT infrastructure technologies and high-performance computing. In addition to his research, Kranzlmüller also supports the Center for Digital Technology and Management.
Dr. Adam S.Z. Belloum is an Assistant Professor in the System and Network Engineering (SNE) research group at the Institute of Informatics of the University of Amsterdam.
Dusan studied Marketing and Engineering at Hogeschool van Amsterdam from 1996 to 2000. After completing the Marketing track, he spent 14 years in the market research industry fulfilling various roles as Project Manager, Software developer, Data Analyst, Team lead and Research Director. During this period he worked on market research projects for Philips, Vodafone, KPN, Microsoft, Nikon, Asics, Grolsch, Heineken, Samsung and many others. He has ample experience in creating engaging web platforms for the business users. Dusan believes that provided information needs to be functional, extremely sophisticated and look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing the insights about complex information in an intuitive way.
In 2014, Dusan began working as a freelance consultant on the development of multiple custom web platforms using modern JavaScript (ES6) and Typescript with the frameworks Angular, React and Vue. He joined the eScience Center to assist in further development of the Research Software Directory.
Job Titles:
- Netherlands EScience Center As an Research Software Engineer
Elena received a PhD degree in Computer Science from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland in 2003 on the topic of 3D texture analysis and modelling with application to MRI brain images.
Since then, she worked on variety of interdisciplinary projects and application areas. At the Centrum Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, Elena worked on European and NWO projects for photo-identification of cetaceans. Her paper on saliency detection for photo-identification was awarded best paper at GVIP in 2005.
In 2007, Elena worked at the Dutch Center for Applied Research, TNO, on object recognition tools for assisting the police investigators in their work. Between 2008 and 2012, she was part of the R&D team of Prime Vision, B.V., Delft, developing OCR and indicia recognition software for the postal industry.
Elena joined the Netherlands eScience Center as an Research Software Engineer in 2013 to work on multidisciplinary projects involving imaging. Between 2014 and 2019, she was an eScience Coordinator and line-manager of several engineers, coordinating many eScience collaborative projects primarily in the climate, biomedical imaging and ecological domains.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board
- Vice - President of the Executive Board of Erasmus University Rotterdam
Ellen van Schoten (1966) is vice-president of the Executive Board of Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR). Before, Van Schoten was COO of the Dutch Authority for the Financial Market (AFM). Van Schoten is a chartered accountant and has a PhD in economics. She received her PhD from Amsterdam VU University in 1999. Her thesis was on Control and Audit of Financial Derivatives at Non-Financial Institutions. In addition to holding this Doctorate in economics, she also holds a Postdoc in Accountancy.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Software Engineer
Erik studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Delft and obtained a PhD in computational linguistics at the University of Groningen. Next, he worked as a postdoc and teacher at the universities of Uppsala (Sweden), Antwerp (Belgium), Tilburg, Amsterdam and Groningen. After a postdoc position at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam, he joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Senior Research Software Engineer in 2017.
Erik has worked on a variety of computational linguistics topics, for example orthographic modeling, syntactic analysis, semantic analysis, named entity recognition, machine translation, summarization, question answering, dialect modeling and analysis of social media text. In his work, he has frequently used machine learning techniques.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Ermanno holds a MSc in Energy Engineering from the University of Bologna and a PhD in Technical Physics from the University of Genoa, where he focused on energy systems modeling, simulation and optimization. He worked for several years as a postdoc at the University of Genoa (1 year) and in Switzerland, at EPFL (3 years), where he developed a data monitoring and fusion platform for the EnergyPolis Campus.
Ermanno also worked at TNO in The Netherlands at the Buildings and Energy System department. Today, at eScience he works as a research software engineer, at the intersection between energy systems modelling and digitalization.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Ewan studied Mathematics at the VU Amsterdam and consequently did a PhD at the CWI. His research focused on efficiently estimating extremely small probabilities. He obtained his PhD degree at the TU/e in January 2019 for his thesis "Rare-event simulation for multidimensional stochastic models".
Following his thesis, he joined a software company where he worked as a full-stack developer on various projects for two and a half years.
In his free time, Ewan enjoys bouldering and playing board games. He also plays in a wind orchestra.
Ewan joined the eScience Center in October 2021 where he will be working as a back-end developer on the Research Software Directory.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Software Engineer
Faruk has a bachelor's degree in Engineering Physics and a master's degree in Experimental Particle Physics. During his master's, he worked for the CERN ATLAS TRT group and was involved in software development as well as detector R&D efforts.
After completing his master's, Faruk started his PhD at Ghent University and he has worked for the ENVISION project which aims to develop novel imaging systems for hadrontherapy. Faruk is completing his PhD at the Center for Advanced Radiation Technology (KVI-CART) at the University of Groningen. During his PhD, Faruk has also been involved in Monte Carlo simulations of proton therapy and related TOF-PET-imaging. He participated in experiments related to proton therapy at the cyclotron facility of KVI-CART.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
During his PhD-at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and at University College London-Flavio investigated how wages and employment are determined when labor markets are not perfectly competitive. To answer these questions, Flavio integrated data from administrative registries, combined them with geospatial data and applied statistical methods. To separate cause from effect, Flavio combined regression analysis with quasi-experimental research designs. To estimate elasticities in economic models of production and labor supply, Flavio wrote R and python programs that apply versions of the Generalized Method of Moments.
Flavio then moved to Aalto University for a post-doc. In a project on e-commerce, he improved and extended the data architecture that he built during his PhD. In another project-funded by Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius foundation-, Flavio and his co-author studied how professional networks shape employment decisions and research productivity of researchers in U.S. academia. Here, Flavio designed and managed a large relational database of bibliometric data, used machine learning and natural language processing to link records between two data sources, and contributed to the statistical analysis of the linked data. Besides research, Flavio also designed and taught a new graduate-level course in labor economics, ran a reading group and organized research workshops for PhD students.
Flavio joined the eScience Center in November 2022 as a Research Software Engineer where he wants to apply methods from statistics and computer science to answer research questions. He also wants to make research software more efficient, open source and reusable-for applications within and outside of academia.
Floris-Jan is a PhD student at the eScience Center and the University of Amsterdam.
Prior to this, he obtained his master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and his bachelor's degree at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.
During his master's he followed the Parallel Computing Systems track.
Frances has a diverse background, but the common thread throughout her career is contributing to peoples (workplace) happiness. She studied Hotel and Event Management at Tio Business School and finished her bachelor's degree in 2017. After graduating Frances began working in the banking sector, but after one year she started a career within recruitment. As a recruiter she worked for several organizations. In recent years, Frances was also involved in HR-related projects in addition to recruitment work. She enjoyed participating in these projects so much that she wanted to further develop within HR.
Job Titles:
- Senior Research Software Engineer
Francesco studied Chemistry, obtaining both a Bachelor's and a Master's from the University of Milan. During his studies, he became interested in the use of computer simulations to model chemical processes. He carried out part of his master's project in the Theoretical Chemistry group at Leiden University, where he then stayed for his PhD and Postdoc. He then moved to EPFL in Switzerland, where he has worked as a Postdoc in the Materials Science department.
During his career, he developed and applied computational methods to perform quantum-mechanical simulations of reactions at surfaces, mostly exploiting high-performance computing. More recently, he has worked on the development of algorithms to model electrochemical interfaces using continuum solvation approaches.
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Communications Specialist
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Vice - Chair of the Board
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
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- Director of Technology
- Netherlands EScience Center As a Research Software Engineer
Nicolas Renaud is the Director of Technology. He is responsible for technology development in all projects and is the manager of the Technology Leads.
Nicolas joined the Netherlands eScience Center as a Research Software Engineer in August 2017 and investigated the use of deep learning techniques for structural biology. In 2021 he joined the middle management team as Section Head of the Natural Science & Engineering section. On 1 March 2024, Nicolas became the Director of Technology.
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- Programme Manager, Environment & Sustainability
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Programme Manager, Life Sciences
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Member of the Advisory Committee
- Researcher / Engineer in Geomatics
Sarah is a researcher/engineer in Geomatics and Remote Sensing and holds a PhD in Earth Observation Science (ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands). She is experienced in statistical modeling, programming, data processing, and software engineering, with expertise in machine learning, optimization, and simulation techniques. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research, with a focus on environmental and sustainability applications.
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Chairman of the Advisory Committee
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- Senior Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Communications Advisor, Team Lead
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- Research Software Engineer
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- Research Software Engineer