Neil Shephard

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.

Current projects:

Interests include:

  • Reproducible research and literate progrmaming
  • Open Science
  • Python, R and Bash
  • Evolutionary Genetics
  • Emacs and Org-mode

Contact: