Conference Committee Members

Programme Chair

Ed leads the Research Software Group within Advanced Research Computing at the University of Birmingham. The RSG offers a range of services provided to researchers, and research groups, with the aim of improving the research software written and used by the researchers. Ed started his career as a software engineer and team leader at QinetiQ, has degrees in Maths and Theology, and is now nearing the end of a part-time PhD in New Testament Textual Criticism at the University of Birmingham.

Logistics and Sponsorship Chair

RSE Network Coordinator, based at the University of Southampton, UK. I coordinate the RSE Community with events, like the conference and RSE Leaders meetings, UK RSE Committee meetings. I am based at the University of Southampton and sit with the RSG team here.

Talks Team

Talks Chair: Bristol. EPSRC RSE Fellow. I manage the RSE Group at Bristol and am also Co-Chair of UKRSE. I enjoy learning how to develop well-engineered research software and helping others do the same.

Talks team member: Canterbury, UK. Experimental Officer, School of Psychology, University of Kent, UK. Professional software engineer dedicated to research software development within the School of Psychology at the University of Kent. Specialist areas include Virtual Reality and Stimulus presentation experiments using Python, PsychoPy/E-Prime and Matlab; Electronics hardware and software development with Arduino(C) and working with electrophysiology equipment (EEG/eye-tracking, ECG, HR, EMG, GSR) and also in data analysis using Python(Pandas) and R(tidyverse).

Talks team member: Cambridge, UK. Research Software Engineer. RSE EPSRC fellow, hosted by Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre. Her objective is to support research in the School of Biology by developing image analysis solutions for light microscopy, with special emphasis on super-resolution microscopy and lightsheet microscopy.

Workshops Team

Workshop Chair: London, UK. Research Software Engineer. In 2007, I graduated my PhD in Theoretical Quantum Physics in the field of ultrafast laser-matter interaction. In following, I have joined several European research groups in that area. In 2014, I worked at UCL on a project involving the computation of spin quits embedded in semiconductor environments. I made a 2-years detour in the transport industry, working on large-scale road traffic simulations and human-machine interaction for driverless cars and finally joined RSDG in August 2017.

Workshop team member: London, UK. Based at the Imperial College London with expertise in Theory of Computation, Databases, Computer Security and Reliability.

Workshop team member: Manchester, UK. Research Software Engineer. I’m a Research Software Engineer who currently works on the SpiNNaker project at the University of Manchester in the Advanced Processor Technologies group in Computer Science, where we have a recently-completed low-power million-core machine that we are currently exploring the best ways to take advantage of. Day-to-day this involves interacting with software users (both locally and remotely), fixing any issues / bugs they may find, and adding functionality to the software stack as required (mainly from a neuroscience point of view, but not necessarily limited to neural modelling).

RSE Worldwide Chairs

International Chair: Leuven, Belgium (1/2). Research Expert in Reproducible Science. In my job I combine research to improve reproducibility in science, engineering and technology with development of ICT tools and online tutorials to support researchers with research data and software management. This includes support with data management plans, data protection and privacy questions. With respect to the ICT tools, we embrace a DevOps methodology and encourage and support our researchers to use GitLab CI / CD in research software development.

International Chair (2/2): Melbourne, Australia. Software Developer (Research Data). I’m an accredited software engineer with thirty years of IT experience, across the development lifecycle and diverse industries. For the last nine years I have been helping researchers, at RMIT University, with advice, development and training in the technologies they can use to enhance their research practices.

Poster Chair

Poster Chair: Leicester, UK. Research Software Engineering Specialist. I work within the RSE team, ReSET, at the University of Leicester. We’re based within IT services and so work with researchers from all faculties, assisting them with their software development. Originally trained as a geneticist/bioinformatician I now specialize in python, web and mobile app development.

Logistics sub-committee

Publicity Chair: Birmingham, UK. Research Training and Engagement Officer in the Advanced Research Computing team (aka BEAR) at the University of Birmingham. Her mission is to increase awareness of HPC and other BEAR services amongst researchers, organise events, and provide training opportunities for users. Before moving to the dark side of research computing(!), Debbie worked in libraries and e-learning. Debbie has been at Birmingham for a long time and also loves chocolate (Cadbury World anyone?), so that could be quite useful for a conference on home territory!.

Diversity & Accessibility Chair: Sheffield, UK. Cloud developer advocate, Microsoft. I have been working as a research software engineer for the last few years mainly focusing on data-intensive research and in the areas of reproducible and open science.

Volunteer Chair: Birmingham, UK. Physicist, academic, proud RSE, EPSRC Tier-2 RSE at University of Birmingham.

Treasurer, Southampton, UK. Deputy Director, Software Sustainability Institute; co-Director, Southampton Research Software Group. Simon is responsible for research and campaigning at the Software Sustainability Institute. In this role, he began the campaign for Research Software Engineers, which has since grown into substantial international community. He was the founding chair of the UK’s Association of Research Software Engineers and is the Principal Investigator of the RSE Network.

Website Chair: Temuco, Chile. Software engineer and researcher at Software Engineering Studies Center, Frontera University, Chile. My research focus is conducting empirical studies in the Software Engineering field.