Research Software Engineers

Emma Barnes

Emma Barnes (Head of Research IT)

I lead the research computing and HPC team.  My background was in Particle Physics where I became a programming and Linux enthusiast.  My current work involves leading the research and high performance computing team,  running the Viking cluster and departmental and centrally managed research computing infrastructure, research IT consultation and general support for academics at the university. I have a strong interest in searching out new technologies that can help academics fulfil their research goals.

Philip Harrison

Philip Harrison (Research Software Engineer Team Lead)

I lead the team of research software engineers in the Research IT Group within IT Services. I manage their deployment across research projects as well as promote RSEs and Research IT facilities within the university.

I also provide support and assistance to researchers focused on the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences faculties. My background is in acoustic engineering, linguistics and forensic science. I am particularly interested in helping researchers with non-technical backgrounds use computing tools to enhance their research.

I am also interested in the use of technology and coding in creative fields such as music and art.

Killian Murphy

Killian Murphy (Research Software Engineer)

I work in the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories, primarily on:

• supporting measurement instrument design/operation
• atmospheric chemical transport and box modelling.

I’m a generalist with an educational background in computer science, and enjoy finding solutions to problems using experience from a range of technical and non-technical fields.

My key skills are:

• interfacing software and hardware
• working efficiently with large volumes of data
• improving existing software workflows
• sustainable software practices.

Ed Higgins

Ed Higgins (Research Software Engineer)

I’m a research software engineer based in the Physics department with a background in condensed matter physics and high performance computing.

I work on a wide range of projects ranging from helping academics develop software solutions to new research problems to improving the optimisation and parallelisation of existing research software.

I have experience using C/Fortran libraries and frameworks such as MPI, OpenMP and CUDA for high performance computing, along with higher level languages such as Python/Numpy or Ruby for more rapid less performance critical software.

I also have some experience working with cloud infrastructure in AWS.

Stuart Lacy

Stuart Lacy (Research Software Engineer)

I am a data scientist and have worked previously in health informatics and epidemiology. I am currently based at the Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories where I provide software support to air quality researchers to: streamline data processing pipelines, build data visualization dashboards, and run statistical analyses. Amongst other things, I am experienced in programming in R and Python, data storage and management, cloud computing, web-development and version control.

Jonathan Hedges

Jonathan Hedges (Research Software Engineer)

I work as a research software engineer as a part of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP) team based in the Institute for Safe Autonomy (ISA) building.

I have been recruited to work on the ISA robot project aiming to create a safe autonomous robot capable of navigating the building with the goal of delivering small objects. The focus of this project is on the safety of the autonomous system. I am experienced in working with Python, C and C#, as well as machine learning libraries and most notably the Robot Operating System (ROS).

Tom Chapman

Tom Chapman (Research Software Engineer)

I work with the Environmental Modelling Research Group on software for modelling sedimentary processes over geological timescales, and with the York Plasma Institute.

My background is in physics, however most of my software experience is in application development in the commercial sector, primarily in high-level, managed languages, such as C#. I have a particular interest in increasing the longevity of software through the principles of 'clean code' and the ideas of software craftsmanship, especially TDD (test-driven development) and XP (extreme programming).