Robert is a Research Software Engineer that previously completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield. He specialises in performance optimisation and GPU parallelisation, following his PhD’s focus on improving the performance of spatial communication in GPU accelerated algorithms.
As a developer of the FLAMEGPU software framework, which facilitates wider access to complex systems modelling on GPUs, he has supported projects ranging from EU funded biological modelling to industrially funded transport modelling.
Since the 2022/2023 academic year he has been the module leader for COM4521/COM6521 that covers parallel programming with OpenMP and CUDA. He also reguarly supervises a small number of undergraduate projects within the school of computer science.
He is also a strong advocate for making software performance best practices accessible to programmers at all skill-levels. First he developed the Profling & Optimisation for Python short-course which is reguarly delivered to researchers at Sheffield. More recently he founded the “Reasonable Performance Computing” Special Interest Group, with support from the Society of Research Software Engineering, to more broadly gather and disseminate performance best practices at a national level. In 2025 he recieved an Software Sustainability Institute fellowship to support this work.