Research Computing Team
Meet the members of the Research Computing Team at Leeds:
Management
Mark Conmy
Role: Head of Research IT
Mark started out with a degree in Computer Science and, after a couple of years as a software engineer in the financial world, has spent over twenty-five years working in academia, specialising in research systems and research-led teaching. As well as developing and supporting software and hardware solutions across the University's wide research portfolio, Mark has lectured in software engineering and championed the need for specialist research support throughout his career. Working as part of the University IT Executive Team, Mark's portfolio encompasses all aspects of Research IT, and how to continue to develop its teams and research capabilities to meet the exciting challenges of the future.Team
Ollie Clark
Role: Research Software Engineer
Ollie is Research Software Engineer at the University of Leeds. He has experience in databases and web development and is familiar with languages including Perl; Python and C/C++. He also has experience with version control and RDBMs including Postgres; MySQL and SQL Server.
Tom Hardcastle
Role: Research Software Engineer
Tom joined the team after working with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre and the School of Chemical and Process Engineering where he was responsible for integrating a molecular mechanics based crystal facet prediction model into the CCDC's Mercury. Prior to this he completed his PhD in the School of Chemical and Process Engineering on Ab Initio crystal morphology prediction with dispersion corrected density functional theory. Tom holds an MSc in Chemical Engineering, an MSc in Colorants, Polymers, and Fine Chemicals, and an MChem in Chemistry. Tom is experienced with linux systems, C++, Python, and Javascript.
John Hodrien
Role: Research Software Engineer
John is a Research Software Engineer working within the Research IT team at the University of Leeds. Starting life as a Computer Scientist at Leeds; he taught parallel programming (C/C++, MPI/pthreads) before becoming a researcher within the Visualisation and Virtual Reality research group, all within the School of Computing. In these research roles he has developed systems for working with pathology data with high resolution display clusters and worked on a number of research projects on e-Science/Grid Computing. More recent work within IT involved providing and supporting a range of predominantly Linux solutions to research and teaching within Engineering and more recently became a leader of this provision for the whole University. John has worked with a number of languages such as C/C++, Java, and Fortran, along with associated toolchains like Git, and has a soft spot for configuration management tools like Puppet, which has been used to provide standard configuration and deployment of systems and solutions at Leeds.
Maeve Murphy Quinlan
Role: Research Software Engineer
Maeve is a Research Software Engineer who joined the Research Computing Team following her PhD in planetary science and meteoritics from the University of Leeds. She previously has applied numerical modelling in Python on ARC4 to investigate the thermal and structural evolution of early-Solar System planetesimals, and to analyse microscopy data from 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite samples. She is interested in scientific software development, publishing research software papers, assisting researchers in packaging their code for re-use, and developing Open Source tools to compliment analysis of geospatial and microscopy data.
Tianyi Pan
Role: Research Software Engineer
Tianyi joined the Research IT team after working on the Supercomputing Wales project as a Research Software Engineer. Tianyi received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Leeds in 2020, focusing on the aerodynamic analysis of mutual benefits between hybrid and distributed propulsion concepts to improve the aerodynamic performance of a large transonic distributed propulsion aircraft. Tianyi has more than 8 years of experience in applying high-fidelity CFD simulations for both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic research on HPC. Before joining Swansea University, Tianyi worked at Proctor & Gamble, as a Research Officer, on collaborative CFD modelling projects for complex fluids and nozzle design optimisation.
Nick Rhodes
Role: Research Software Engineer
Nick is a Research Software Engineer at the University of Leeds. Before moving to this role he worked as an Operational Lead supporting the student information management systems and DBA team. He has extensive experience working in higher education and NHS developing and supporting large enterprise systems. Nick is skilled in a wide range of technologies and programming languages across web, applications, databases, networking and server infrastructure. He has frequently worked in devops and lean/agile teams.
Patricia Ternes
Role: Research Software Engineer
Patricia is a Research Software Engineer, focusing on Computational Mechanics, at the University of Leeds. She has a PhD in Theoretical Physics and a Master degree in Condensed Matter Physics. Her research focuses on the development of computational models that help to understand complex systems; initially focusing on phenomena such as the behaviour of fluids at nano‐scales and lately modelling emergence in spatio‐social systems. Previously, she worked as a Researcher in Simulating Urban Systems at the School of Geography (2019-2021), and before joining the University of Leeds, Patricia also worked as an physics undergraduate professor at Federal Institute Catarinense-Brazil (2018-2019).
Andy Turner
Role: Research Software Engineer
Andy joined the team in June 2023 transfering from the School of Geography where he specialised in geographical information systems and computational geography for over 25 years. He has followed Java development since Java 1.3, and Python development since Python 3.6 and is familiar with C, Fortran, Javascript, R and shell scripting. Andy has expertise in software sustainability, sensitive data management and computational reproducibility.Team Alumni
Martin Callaghan
Role: Research Computing Consultant
Martin is a Research Computing Consultant and part of the Research Computing group at the University of Leeds in the UK, where we provide High Performance Computing (HPC), Programming and Software Development consultancy across a diverse research community. My role involves Research Software Engineering, training, consultancy and outreach. He also manages a comprehensive HPC and Research Computing training programme designed to be a 'zero to hero' structured introduction to HPC, Cloud and research software development. Before joining the University of Leeds, he worked as an Engineer designing machine tool control systems, a teacher and ran his own training and consultancy business. Personal research interests are in text analytics, particularly using neural networks to summarise text at scale.
Alex Coleman
Role: Research Software Engineer
Previously, he worked in Leeds Institute of Data Analytics as a Data Scientist intern on projects looking at automatically classifying police dispatch reports using natural language processing and developing methods for simulating police supply and demand. He has experience using Python and R to wrangle data, develop statistical models and implement and deploy interactive applications built ontop those models. He is evangelical about reproducible research especially through leveraging software development tools such as version control, CI/CD, documentation and testing to make code more open and more useful. Alex has moved on to work as lead developer with Active Travel England.
Luke Conibear
Role: Research Software Engineer
Luke is a Research Software Engineer focusing on Machine Learning. He used to be a postdoc in air pollution using numerical models to understand how to improve public health. He currently works with the Centre for Doctoral Training in Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care.Related Teams
Data Analytics Team (DAT)
The DAT Team are based in Leeds Institute of Data Analytics and provide support for LIDA based projects around data management, data analysis and software engineering. They also support the secure research platform LASER.
Adam Keeley
Role: Data Analyst
Adam is a Data Analyst in the Data Analytics Team at Leeds Institute of Data Analytics (LIDA) His background is in harnessing database and business intelligence tools. He is familiar working with SQL server, C#, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS.