RSE SHEFFIELD - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Anna is a Research Software Engineer. She fell in love with statistical programming and R in particular, during her PhD in Macroecology at the University of Sheffield. This was followed by two years of freelancing as a Research Data Scientist. These and previous experiences as a quality assurance auditor have led her to focus on efforts to promote more transparent, robust, reproducible research through better scientific software development and research data management.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Becky is a Research Software Engineer who worked with the University of Sheffield RSE group and the Alan Turing institute developing open-source guidance on best practice for reproducible data science. She took a leave of absence from her astrophysics research (where she uses simulations to study the evolution of star clusters) to work on this project.
She is also a Software Sustainability Institute fellow and is using the fellowship finds to organise a series of talks and workshops on a diverse range of topics surrounding best practice.
Bob was a senior research software engineer who started his career in software and databases after completing a degree in Applied Physics at the University of Durham. After four years in the private sector, he did a PhD in Biophysics at the University of Leeds, before working as a postdoc researcher at the University of Sheffield in several departments, including Physics and Astronomy, Molecular Biology and Biotechnology Mechanical, Engineering and the Dental School, reflecting an unusually broad range of research interests spanning microscopy, microbiology, engineering and healthcare.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Dan joined the RSE team in December 2022. His background is in Cognitive Neuroscience, completing his PhD at Goldsmiths in 2016. Since then he has worked as a Research Fellow at Birkbeck and the University of Surrey and as Research Technician at the University of Reading. He has experience of writing research software and analysis pipelines using R, Python and Julia. He is also a keen advocate of open and reproducible research practices.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
David was a Research Software Engineer in the University of Sheffield's RSE group.
David graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in mathematics and a Post-Graduate Diploma in Computer Science, and has since taken a variety of mostly systems programming roles in industry before recently being employed in The Academy.
David has expertise in C, Python, Go, Lua, embedded microcontrollers, programming language runtimes, Software Engineering Management, /bin/awk, and the PNG image format.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
- Senior Research Software Engineer
David is a Senior Research Software Engineer with a research background in optical physics and sensory biology. Following a PhD and postdoc at the University of Bristol and a postdoc at Lund University David made the transition to research software engineering in 2019.
His interests in research software relate to: impact enhancement, reproducibility and sustainability, best practice and environmental and social responsibility, in addition to interests in training researchers in research software.
In 2022, David became a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute with a project on developing guidance and training around reproducible research in MATLAB.
He has been involved in numerous research projects including:
building Django-based web apps,
apps for medical research proof of principle in clinical trials,
COVID modelling software quality at the UK Joint Biosecurity Centre,
dockerising and python packaging NLP tools.
Email: d.wilby (at) sheffield.ac.uk
Website: davidwilby.dev
Dr Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh is a GPU developer advocate at NVIDIA helping to bring GPU and HPC to growing user community in Europe and around the world. She is a community builder with a passion for open source software and is actively involved in the HPC and RSE communities. As a Software Sustainability Institute fellow, and Research Software Engineer (RSE) advocate, she is actively promoting reproducible and sustainable software, use of HPC and particularly GPUs through training, seminars, research software consultancy and outreach.
Mozhgan served as the chair of the women in HPC series of workshops at the International Supercomputing Conference and was on the organizing and program committee of leading conferences in the HPC field. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science and a master's degree in Information Technology from the University of Glasgow, UK.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Edwin joined the RSE team in October 2022. He comes from a background in geophysics following a BSc and MSc in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Leeds. After university, he worked in the private sector, developing machine learning (ML) workflows to solve geophysical imaging and inversion problems.
Edwin has practical experience in the designing, training and evaluation of ML models. He is experienced in Python having worked with data science libraries such as Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, Tensorflow and Keras. He has a growing interest in MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) and the practical challenges of scaling up ML practices.
Fariba Yousefi is in the process of completing her PhD in Machine Learning at the department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. She recently joined the research software engineering team as a machine learning research engineer at the university of Sheffield.
Her research interests are Gaussian Processes, data scarcity, imbalanced data and multi-task learning. She enjoys working on healthcare applications.
Fariba's experience in chairing and organizing scientific events include: the Gaussian processes summer school (http://gpss.cc/) and the Women in Machine Learning (WiML https://wimlworkshop.org/), where she was the senior programme chair at the affinity workshop for ICML 2020.
She also contributes to open source projects such as GPy.
John was a PhD student and Research Software Engineer. Previous work had involved simulating dense crowds of virtual pedestrians, using GPUs to model many tens of thousands of people in real time. His interests included agent-based modelling, visualisation and interaction of simulations. Expertise includes GPU-accelerated computing and agent-based modelling approaches.
He is currently working on a RateSetter project examining the boarding rate and risk at the Platform-Train interface.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer in Complex Systems
Matt is a Research Software Engineer in Complex Systems. He has a background in computer graphics, using physical-modelling to produce animations. He has recently completed his PhD on modelling the human mouth using the finite element method and also has experience with fluid simulation. Aside from physical-modelling, he also has research experience working with virtual and augmented reality.
Matt's work on the team primarily revolves around the development of FLAMEGPU and advocating the use of GPU computing to support research. He is currently improving the performance of a model of tuberculosis spread.
Job Titles:
- Head of Research IT at the University of Leeds
Mike is now head of Research IT at the University of Leeds. He is also an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow with 10+ years experience supporting scientific software, high performance computing and research software engineering at The University of Manchester and, more recently, the University of Sheffield. Mike specialises in high-level languages such as MATLAB, R, Python and Mathematica but also has significant experience with compiled languages such as C and Fortran and assists researchers in developing faster, more robust, more usable code. Mike writes about research software on his blog, www.walkingrandomly.com, which receives over 500,000 visitors annually.
He is an accredited Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructor.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Neil has taken a convoluted path to reach his current role as research software engineer. After completing his undergraduate (BSc Zoology and Genetics) and post-graduate (MSc in Genetic Epidemiology) at The University of Sheffield he spent a number of years as a Genetics Statistician researching the aetiology of complex human diseases at University of Manchester, and University of Western Australia before returning to University of Sheffield learning UNIX system administration and literate programming along the way. He then shifted careers to medical statistics and spent eight years working at the Clinical Trials Research Unit at the University of Sheffield. Throughout this time Neil developed and became enthusiastic about reproducible research and developed practical approaches to achieving reproducible research in R using RMarkdown.
In 2018 he left academia for the private sector working for a telematics company using data captured from mobile phones and "black boxes" to quantify driver behaviour. Here he developed an understanding of working with geo-spatial data and learnt Python along with various aspects of good software development practices including working collaboratively using Git for version control.
Paul was a co-founder of the RSE team and led its growth and development from three staff to a team of roughly 12 full time employees over a period of six years. He is the RSE team lead at the Cambridge Institute of Computing for Climate Science but holds a part time role at the University of Sheffield as a Professor of Research Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science. He no longer oversees the RSE team but is actively engaged in research projects and impact work relating to the application of research software, in particular the FLAME GPU software for GPU accelerated agent based simulation. Paul was formally an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow and President of the society of Research Software Engineering](https://society-rse.org/about/governance/rse-society-trustees-2020-2021/). He is actively engaged in the national RSE community and retains interest in advancing the national provision of RSE collaboration including within the University of Sheffield.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Peter is a Research Software Engineer in the process of completing his PhD at the University of Sheffield. He specialises in GPU accelerated computing and complex system simulations; including transport network simulation and biological cellular simulations. He is currently working on the STriTuVaD project (a Horizon2020 project), which focuses on the use of in silico trials to support and improve tuberculosis vaccine development.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Phil is a Research Software Engineer and former theoretical and computational physicist, with particular interest in mathematical modelling, code optimisation and parallelism. He is an experienced developer of "traditional" parallel HPC codes using MPI and OpenMP in C, C++ and Fortran, but also champions the use of the Numpy/Scipy stack for scientific computing with python. This includes the use of accelerator technologies including Numba and Cython to write custom python code which is speed competitive with traditional compiled languages, possible in conjunction with parallel frameworks such as Dask.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
- Research Software Engineer / Research Associate in Large Scale Simulation
Robert is a Research Software Engineer that previously completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield. He specialises in GPU accelerated computing and complex system simulations, following his PhD's focus on improving the performance of spatial communication in GPU accelerated algorithms.
He is a developer of the FLAMEGPU software framework, facilitating wider access to complex systems modelling on GPUs.
Previously he worked on the PRIMAGE project, which proposed an open cloud-based platform to support decision making in the clinical management of two paediatric cancers. In particular, working towards the development of a cell scale model of neuroblastoma to be scaled across multiple GPUs and distributed HPC resources.
Currently he is working with Fujitsu Research Europe developing a GPU accelerated transport model.
Since the 2022/2023 academic year he has been the module leader for COM4521/COM6521 that covers parallel programming with OpenMP and CUDA.
Tania left RSE Sheffield for a Research Associate/Research Software Engineer position at the University of Leeds. She has a PhD in computational nanomechanics at the University of Manchester where she focused on the multi-scale modelling of biological and biocompatible materials. She is part of Open Dream Kit (a Horizon2020 project), which focuses on the set up of Virtual research environments. Her interests include data science/engineering, reproducible research and supporting research teams to develop and optimise complex data analysis workflows. Also, she is actively involved in community building, mentoring, and scientific outreach activities within and outside the University of Sheffield.
She is an accredited Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructor.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer
Twin is a Research Software Engineer who completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield. He specialises in High-performance agent-based pedestrian simulation, Parallel computing using GPUs, Virtual reality and Deep learning. He currently provides consultancy, training and technical support for researchers on Deep learning and other GPU related software engineering problems.
Job Titles:
- Research Software Engineer