Previous members of the RSE Sheffield team:
Mike left the RSE Sheffield team in 2018 to become 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.
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 left the RSE Sheffield team in 2023 to become 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. 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.
Will was a Research Software Engineer who was previously:
Will left the RSE Sheffield Team in 2021 to become a Research Platforms Engineer at the University of Sheffield.
Previous projects:
The path to this point has not been particularly direct: he has a computer science degree, has worked as a IT systems engineer in the film industry, has a PhD plus post-doc experience in water engineering (where he developed semi-physical and data-driven models of water quality in water distribution networks) and has provided support to the users of the University of Sheffield’s high-performance computing clusters. In addition he has taught or helped run RSE, water engineering and study skills workshops. His interests include helping researchers optimise data analysis workflows (primarily using higher-level languages), providing training in RSE best practices and systems administration.
He is an accredited Carpentries instructor and has facilitated Software and Data Carpentry workshops on topics including Python, R, version control with Git, the UNIX shell and SQL.
Adam is now Lecturer in Data Science and AI in the Information School at the University of Sheffield. Until July 2024 he was a Senior Research Software Engineer with a focus on AI and ML, working jointly at the Alan Turing Institute and the RSE group at Sheffield. His research background is in nature-inspired autonomous systems, with particular focus on evolutionary robotics. Prior to taking up this post he held a lectureship in Computer Science at Aston University and before that, a similar position at Keele University.
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.
Bob left the RSE Sheffield team in 2023 to take up a Research Software Engineering position at the University of Oxford.
An accomplished researcher with some important publications, as a software engineer Bob collaborates with researchers to develop and improve software. This of course involved writing code, but also lots of liaison, discussion, leadership and, most importantly, listening!
Bob’s role included contributing to the management of the RSE team, under Paul Richmond’s leadership. His work included:
Contact:
David was 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.
David left the RSE Sheffield team in 2023 to take up a role as a Research Software Engineer at the British Antarctic Survey.
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:
dockerising and python packaging NLP tools.
Tania left the RSE Sheffield team in 2018 for a Machine Learning Engineer position at Hello Soda. 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.
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.
Becky left the RSE Sheffield team in 2019 to take up a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at the University of Massachusetts.
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.
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.
John left the RSE Sheffield team in 2020 to take up a role as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, in Neopath, part of the School of Clinical Dentitry
He is currently working on a RateSetter project examining the boarding rate and risk at the Platform-Train interface.
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 left the RSE Sheffield team in 2020 to become a typographer.
David has expertise in C, Python, Go, Lua, embedded microcontrollers, programming language runtimes, Software Engineering Management, /bin/awk, and the PNG image format.
Dr Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh left the RSE Sheffiled team in 2020 to become 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.
Prior to joining Nvidia, Mozhgan was a Research Software Engineer in Massive Scale Complex Systems Simulation with Accelerated Computing at the University of Sheffield, UK. She worked in the area of complex system modelling using emerging high-performance parallel architectures.
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.
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.
Anna left the RSE Sheffield team in 2022 to become a freelance Research Software Engineering consultant.
She’s also passionate about community and capacity building. She has extensive teaching experience, was part of the inaugural Mozilla Science Lab Open Leadership Training cohort, has been a veteran mentor on following rounds and a member of the organising committee for the Sheffield R users group.
Key interests include:
Open source research technologies and culture enabling next generation open science.
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.
Phil left the RSE Sheffield team in 2019 to take up a role as a Senior Software Engineer at the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).
Fariba Yousefi completed her PhD in Machine Learning at the department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. She joined the RSE Sheffield team as a machine learning research engineer.
Fariba left the RSE Sheffield team in 2022 to take up a role as an AI Scientist at AstraZeneca.
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.
For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk
Information and access to JADE II and Bede.
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Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.