In this role she will help to develop the N8's RSE community. She will also work alongside the software engineers who will be supporting Bede, our new HPC platform, to ensure that as many researchers as possible can benefit from its unique architecture.
Marion has extensive experience of both academia and the private sector. She originally studied for the German equivalent of a Masters in Computer Science before completing a PhD in Scientific Computing on parallel multigrid solvers for computational fluid dynamics codes.
She first came to Durham as a post-doc where she was developing computational solar physics codes as part of a project looking at space weather research with the Met Office and United States Air Force.
After some time in the private sector with the research and development team of an x-ray technology start-up, she joined Advanced Research Computing at Durham University as a research software engineer. Much of her work as been refactoring and optimising code, preferably in Fortran, C++, Python, MATLAB and Bash.
Since joining Durham’s RSE team in October 2019 she has supported a number of university departments on diverse projects. These include working with the department of maths on computational solar physics codes, classroom simulations evaluating teacher and pupil and learning styles for the school of education, the geography department to refactor ice sheet modelling codes and the business school to optimise algorithms in econometrics.
You can read more about Marion, and the RSE team at ARC here: https://n8cir.org.uk/supporting-research/rse/case-studies/
Marion is already an active member of the RSE community having been elected a trustee of the Society of Research Software Engineering this year, and being a member of the programme committee of the ongoing Series of Research Software Events (SORSE). Over the summer she was active in organising and supporting our online RSE meet-ups, so is already a familiar face to many of the RSEs across the N8. You can see overviews of the RSE Career Development and Speed Blogging sessions on our Event Resources pages at: https://n8cir.org.uk/events/event-resource/
We’re looking forward to seeing more of Marion’s influence in the development of events, activities, training and meet-ups across the N8 Research Partnership.