Will Furnass

Research Software Engineer

Will was a Research Software Engineer who was previously:

• Helping Paul Richmond lead the RSE team
• Contributing to the development and maintenance of University research computing platforms (inc. HPC)

Will left the RSE Sheffield Team in 2021 to become a Research Platforms Engineer at the University of Sheffield.

Previous projects:

• Packaging, test infrastructure, releases and documentation for the MuMoT multi-scale modelling tool.
• Workflows and data management for the Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre.
• Research computing strategy and support for the INSIGNEO Institute for in silico Medicine.
• Software development and code optimisation for Out Of Our Minds, a Leverhume Trust-funded project to “develop new, accurate ways of describing speakers’ linguistic knowledge, by using machine-learning techniques that mimic the way in which humans learn”.
• A JupyterHub service for the University’s ShARC HPC system, plus training materials that can be delivered using that service (the materials relate to multithreading/multiprocessing using Python. Work conducted as part of OpenDreamKit, an EU-funded project to further the computational mathematics ecosystem.

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.

• Email: w.furnass (at) sheffield.ac.uk
• Web: https://learningpatterns.me
• Twitter: @willfurnass