DRI 2025 Panellist Biographies

Adrian Clark has worked for Figshare/Digital Science for 2.5 years where his role focuses on giving demonstrations of Figshare for Institutions Research Repository, creating solutions using workflows and matching requirements for institutions who are implementing a repository. Before this, he worked as an Academic Librarian in several HE institutions supporting teaching, research and scholarship.

Adrian Harwood has worked as an RSE for the last 10 years on computational fluid mechanics in aerospace engineering, using super-computing platforms with OpenMP/MPI libraries in C++, writing GPU software with CUDA, and mobile and web apps with C# .NET. He was a senior RSE in the Manchester group for 3.5 years before becoming head of the department in 2022. He has been running a large-scale expansion programme of the Manchester RSE group which has grown by >30% and overseen the introduction of a raft of operational improvements including workload models, capacity planning, development pathways and agile project management tools and techniques. Adrian's university web page.

Alan Real is the Director of Advanced Research Computing (ARC) at Durham University, Technical Director of the N8 Centre for Computationally Intensive Research (N8-CIR) and Director of the EPSRC Tier-2 service, Bede.

Beginning his career as a Beowulf system administrator after a PhD in Molecular Biophysics, Alan has undertaken roles in HPC user support before moving towards developing and managing research computing units both within IT organisations and as a dedicated department within research division.

Alan held Executive roles within the High Performance Computing Special Interest Group for several years and has recently concluded his term as Chair of the committee that assists STFC with its oversight of DiRAC.

Andrew Edmondson, known as 'Ed', started his career as a software engineer and team leader at QinetiQ after completing an MMath at the University of Oxford. He left QinetiQ to complete a BA in Theology at Birmingham Christian College after which he worked part-time as a senior developer at ApplianSys working on embedded Linux and Python firmware for network appliances. Ed completed a part-time PhD in New Testament Textual Criticism at the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE) at the University of Birmingham supervised by Professor David Parker. He is currently an Honorary Fellow of ITSEE.

In 2016 he joined Advanced Research Computing at the University of Birmingham and founded the Research Software Group, which has now grown to 25 posts. He is an active member of the Society of Research Software Engineering, and was the Programme Chair of the 2019 UK RSE Conference. Ed is currently the Chair of the HPC-SIG for UK Academia. Ed's University web page.

Arianna Ciula is Director and Senior Research Software Analyst at King’s Digital Lab (KDL), King's College London, where she line manages a team of 12 digital Research Technical Professionals engaged in the design and implementation of systems, infrastructure, tools, and processes needed to produce a heterogeneous range of digital scholarly outputs in the arts and humanities and cultural heritage research domains. She has longstanding experience in Digital Humanities (DH) research, research management and DRIs (including research funding, strategy and policy). She is an active member of the Research Software Engineers (RSE) and DH communities.

She researches modelling processes (from co-design and analysis to data modelling) for the application of computational methods to the study of cultural-historical objects and phenomena and advocates for the role of processes and diverse expertise in DRIs. Arianna's University Web Page.

Ben Pietrasis currently a Senior Research Platform Engineer at the University of Liverpool.
 Having worked as a Postdoc in Nuclear Physics for a number of years both at Santiago de Compostela & Manchester, he fell into HPC a few years ago and got a taste for it. His interests include new technologies, container solutions and open source software.

Bill Ayres is the Strategic Lead for Research Data Management within the University of Manchester Library. His focus areas for RDM services include open data publishing, data management planning, plus training, advocacy and support for our research community across all disciplines. He is part of the Research Lifecycle Programme management team and the renewed programme will continue to remove barriers to research over the next five years. With nearly 20 years of experience in the sector, Bill delivered IT infrastructure services and projects at faculty level (storage, compute, networks, desktop) before moving to the library side and developing a passion for open research. Bill's university web page.

Chris Jewell is a Professor in Statistics at Lancaster University, who specialises in Monte-Carlo inference methods for epidemic analysis and forecasting. He manages a team of RSEs and RIEs at Lancaster, centred on the School of Mathematical Sciences, for the last 5 years

With a background in epidemiology, he is interested in how statistical methods come together with computer science to solve high-dimensional problems in health data science.

During Covid-19, he worked with the SPI-M-O subcommittee of SAGE on spatial epidemic modelling in the UK, which has demanded rapid development of new statistical methods, fast algorithm run times, and implementation of automated software pipelines. Chris' university web page.

Cristin Merritt is the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Alces Flight, bringing over 20 years of enterprise technology expertise, including more than nine years in High Performance Computing (HPC). She specializes in analyzing market trends and fostering the convergence of technical and social sustainability in supercomputing. At Alces Flight, Cristin has led impactful hybrid HPC integration projects, earning global recognition for innovation. In 2024, she launched "Move the Needle," a 12-month initiative focused on advancing inclusivity in HPC, resulting in a 2024 publication and a follow-up slated for 2025.

Cristin’s leadership has positioned Alces Flight as a pioneer in HPC integration and subscription products and services, delivering solutions to simplify workload demands. A dedicated advocate for equity and diversity, she serves on the Women in HPC Executive Committee, chairs communications for SC25, and spearheads the annual Women’s History Month profile project for the SC conference series.

Dave Love has been working in research computing longer than most, initially as a nuclear physicist, then as what's now called an RSE, later mixing that up with systems management. In that time he's seen or done most relevant things, some allegedly impossible, and experienced more-or-less successful national and international collaborations. He's particularly interested in free software, useful measurement, security, and education.

David Baldwin has recently returned to working within the university environment after 25 years in industry with HPC and R&D IT. David's university web page.

Diego Alonso Alvarez became an RSE after 13 years of research experience in the field of materials science and solar cells. From there, he evolved to Senior RSE and, over 2 years ago, became the Head of the Central RSE team at Imperial. He still manages to do a significant amount of coding, which he still enjoys although his main concern as Head of RSE is to ensure the happiness of the team, the sustainability of the team's workload, the impact of the work done beyond project consultancy-style activities, and effectively interacting with other RSEs and RSE teams scattered across Imperial. Diego's university web page.

Eamonn Bell is a researcher in the digital humanities (DH), with a background in music studies and now teaches and researches in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. He is currently Project Co-Lead and Infrastructure Lead on "Digital Skills in Arts and Humanities (DiSKAH): Transforming Access to Digital Infrastructure and Skills”, a UKRI-funded DRI project (2024-2027) supporting the development of digital skills by Arts and Humanities researchers. One of the objectives of DiSKAH is to increase the number of researchers who are prepared to make use of UK DRI to support computationally intensive research, for example, through the use of UKRI-funded HPC resources to run AI/ML pipelines on large corpora of cultural data. Eamonn's niversity web page.

Fernando Andreu

Fred Sonnenwald was a post-doc in Civil Engineering, researching how pollutants disperse in water using numerical modelling. Among other things he ran both simple codes and commercial CFD packages on HPC, and recognised in the process of his research the importance of programming on repeatability and that more researchers should be working programmatically. He has since become a Research Data Engineer within the University of Sheffield's Research IT Data Analytics Service helping researchers make better use of computing resources. He delivers the university's HPC Training Course, but the majority of his time is spent on projects working with researchers to develop custom codes for collecting and storing research data. Fred's university web page.

Jeremy Cohen is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Director of Research Software Engineering Strategy at Imperial College London. He has a Computer Science background and has extensive experience in providing research software support to multi-disciplinary research projects in a range of domains.

His research interests include Research Software Engineering, distributed/service-oriented computing and career and skills development for technical professionals. Jeremy started and runs both the local Imperial Research Software Community and the RSLondon regional research software community. He currently leads the EPSRC-funded "STEP-UP" regional strategic technical platform that is applying a range of approaches to develop skills and careers for digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs). Jeremy's university web page.

Jianping Meng is currently a Senior Research Platform Engineer at the University of Liverpool. His major responsibility is developing and managing the high-performance computing cluster as well as broad research computing services. Before this role, he was a Computational Scientist at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory developing high-performance computational fluid dynamic codes (CFD) capable of using emerging computing hardware, e.g., GPU.

Jools Kasmire works as the computational social science training lead at UKDS, so they have a lot of experience in helping people understand the links between data, methods, and research questions. They typically use agent-based modelling, text mining, and machine learning methods, but recently they have been working a lot with synthetic data and how it can contribute to research as well as reproducibility. They don’t have a lot of experience in planning, creating, or maintaining infrastructure, but they do have experience using infrastructure and planning, creating, and adjusting process guidance on how researchers can use computational methods, reproducibility efforts, and more. Jools's university web page.

Keming Yang is an academic researcher who uses digital data in his research, including social survey datasets, digitized interview transcripts, social media posts, etc. He is familiar with the methodological issues in collecting and using digital data. Keming's university web page.

Kirsty Merrett is Research Data Librarian at University of Bristol. She advises researchers how to manage, store and share research data, and helps them publish open and controlled access data at the University of Bristol's data repository, data.bris. She has authored publications on controlled data access, designing institutional policy, embedding RDM services in institutions, and is a frequent speaker at international conferences. She also works with the UK Reproducibility Network's Open Research Programme, where she designs and delivers Train the Trainer workshops on Research Data and Sensitive Data to UK HEIs. Kirsty is currently researching the sustainability of a National peer-to-peer network for UK Reproducibility Network's Open Research Programme's Training project, and is working with colleaguues at the Irish Data Stewardship Newtork, Sonraí, to establish a curriculum for Microcredentials for Data Stewards. Kirsty's university web page.

Li Convey is a Senior Research Manager in EPSRC.

Manhui Wang is a High-performance computing (HPC) team leader skilled in HPC/AI, Linux system administration, management of research computing facilities including data storage, designing and implementing research computing infrastructure, coordinating bespoke procurement, strategic planning of research computing services, IT user support, parallel programming (MPI/OpenMP/CUDA), research software support, and large-scale scientific software development. Strong research background in chemistry and engineering. He is the key developer and first author of the open source library PPIDD (Parallel Programming Interface for Distributed Data with Multiple Helper Servers), which has been successfully implemented in large-scale quantum chemistry package Molpro of which he is also one of the developers and authors. His co-authored papers and co-developed software has been cited over 5000 times.

Mariann Hardey is an Associate Professor of Business and Computing at Durham University Business School, and a member of the University of Durham's Directorate for Advanced Research Computing (ARC), where she teaches business inclusivity, self-help, and business technology.

Mariann is passionate about self-development and learning, with a focus on representation among business leaders and practitioners. She has given numerous presentations at international conferences and events, including the first TEDx event in the United Kingdom, and her work has been featured in international media.

Mariann's two most recent books are The Culture of Women in Technology: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and Household Self-Tracking in a Global Health Crisis.

Martin Callaghan

Martin Turner has set-up RSE specific groups in last decade; especially within the UKRI-DRI funded CCP / HEC consortiums. Managing the complete roles of user needs, community networking, coding portfolio, outcomes and measuring deliverables - all with differing levels of success.

Martin Wolstencroft was originally a geologist. He has a PhD in Computational Geophysics, for which he used the EPCC HECToR NERC allocation. He also built a small cluster from spare PCs. He then spent approximately 4.5 years as a (geo)computational Postdoc, before the lure of a permanent job led him to work in the environmental consultancy industry as a scientific software testing lead. In 2020, he saw a version of his dream job and felt that he had sufficient experience to do it well. Since then, he has looked after research computing strategy, sysadmin, user support, documentation, training, and process development at the University of Bradford. As a small institution (their HPC typically has 20-30 active users in any given month), he gets to do and see a lot, such as being on interview panels for research staff. His mixed academia and industry background gives him a perspective on how problems get solved, and this has helped him act at the interface between researchers and university IT.

Massimillano Fasi is currently a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Leeds. He has a computer science background but obtained a PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Manchester. He has positive experience collaborating with industry and has been an intern in an RSE role at a numerical software company. He can provide the academic perspective on a few of the topics discussed at the event, but his main reason for attending is to hear the point of view of the DRI professionals.

Matt Penn has spent 7 years at King’s managing SysAdmin teams focused on HPC, private cloud, and TRE development. Prior to this, he spent 10 years working in the hedge fund industry. Having recently overseen the development of an ISO 27001 certified Trusted Research Environment, he believes he would be a suitable panel member for the Security and Compliance session. His engineering philosophy delivers a highly automated, highly secured yet flexible environment for computational researchers. His team aims to develop and retain talented engineers to pursue such work in-house using open-source building blocks throughout. At last year’s CIUK event, he gave a presentation on some of the systems developed to secure research computing over recent years.

Matt Probert is Professor of Computational Physics at the University of York and the Director of the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR) since its creation in 2018. He was the chair of the EPSRC-funded High End Computing Consortia (UKCP) from 2007 - 2022, and has also been a member of the ARCHER2 Science Board, and the EPSRC HPC SAC. He is a lead developer of the widely-used first principles materials modelling code 'CASTEP' and uses this to study the structure and dynamical properties of matter. Matt regularly lectures on HPC and first principles material modelling at the University of York and elsewhere.

Michael Holliday is Head of Research IT Infrastructure at UCL and Chair of the GPFS UK User Group. He has managed and looked after HPC and storage systems at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL. Michael has also built systems for various customers while working at a systems integrator. He currently leads the research infrastructure team, with direct involvement in the design and expansion of the UCL research data platform, including tiered storage, archive, and backup. He is also the chair of the Storage Scale/GPFS User Group. He has interests in all research computing systems, with a particular focus on research storage systems and managing data throughout its lifetime.

Michael Rudgyard is CEO at Alces Flight. He is an entrepreneur and ex-academic with extensive experience of HPC and data-centre markets acquired over a 30-year career.

Michael has held executive positions in four start-ups, one of which was notably acquired by the tech giant ARM, as well as academic positions at Oxford and Warwick Universities, and a senior research position at CERFACS in Toulouse, France.

Michael has a BSc. in Mathematics with Engineering and a D. Phil in Mathematics.

Neil Dullaway

Owen Thomas has almost 40 years of HPC experience in many roles, of which the last 20 of which are as the founder and CEO of Red Oak Consulting. He has I have been involved in all types of projects.

Paul Ruth joined the Advanced Research Computing (ARC) after completing his PhD in Chemistry at the beginning of 2023 to work on a software project aiming to provide a common platform for software packages used in his field of research, in collaboration with the University of Southampton. In addition to regular (mostly Python) development in the project, he also brings scientific expertise to the project.

Peter Heywood is a Research Software Engineer at the University of Sheffield, specialising in GPU-accelerated computing and complex systems simulations. He has extensive experience in developing and optimising GPU-accelerated applications across various academic domains and with industrial partners. Additionally, he provides support for GPU projects across the university and is a member of the N8 CIR Bede support group.

Polly Eccleston is a Senior Research IT Business Partner at the University of Bristol. She has 25-years' experience in technical client-facing roles, across commercial software companies, research groups, and Academic IT and Advanced Research Computing services.

Following an MSc in Computer Science, Polly spent 10 years working in software companies before transitioning to the University of Bristol 15 years ago. For the past 7 years Polly has worked in the University's Advanced Computing Research group - providing large scale compute and data services and research software engineering advice and training to Academic researchers and educators.

Polly is a member of the HPC-SIG (High Performance Computing-Specialist Interest Group) organising committee with a focus on Equity Diversity Inclusion and Accessibility. Polly is deeply motivated to support and enable academics to address global challenges through their Research using sustainable Digital Research Infrastructure.

Sam Bland is the N8CIR RSE theme lead and has been an embedded RSE in the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York since 2020. His interests are in all things research software from the use of HPCs to digital citizen science web tools and most recently the development of RSE communities. His software engineer background has included working with masters students to experienced researchers, business enthusiasts to international business owners. This has resulted in insight into the challenges that cross scales and domains within research software and the need to engage with the user-computer interface at every stage. In the coming years, he hopes to understand the challenges faced in developing research software and help support the frameworks and communities that are tackling them.

Samantha Ahern

Santiago Molina works as senior policy manager for UKRI's Digital Research Infrastructure Programme leading on policy work around the main themes of DRI - compute, data, software and skills, among others. His experience within DRI is related to policy and stakeholder engagement.

Sarah Jaffa is a Senior Research Software Engineer in the University of Manchester's Research IT team, having previously worked as an RSE in UCL's Centre for Advanced Research Computing, and as an astrophysics researcher at the University of Hertfordshire and Cardiff University. She enjoys teaching and training and has been an active member of the UK Carpentries community for 3 years. She is passionate about helping researchers use, write and preserve code and enjoys making Python code tidier and C++ friendlier. She is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, working on Project Management in RSE.

Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow 2023, has a Masters degree in statistics from the University of Pune, and is a Technical Writer for the Google Summer of Code 2020, Code for Science and Society's Digital Infrastructure Incubator 2021, Google Season of Docs 2022, and as a Subject Matter Expert for the Open Science Tools and Resources Module of NASA TOPS. In 2021, she participated in the Open Life Science program (cohort-4), during which she co-founded the Research Software Engineering (RSE) Asia Association.

For her work in the RSE community, she was awarded the RSE Impact Award 2022 at the Inaugural Community Awards by the Society of RSE. She has been a speaker at number of international events including useR!, Asia Pacific Advanced Network meetings, RSECon, FAB conference, FOSDEM, JuliaCon. Currently, Saranjeet serves as a Research Software Engineer in the Central Research Software Engineering team at Imperial College London.

Saul Cozens is the senior manager responsible for the IT services and products that researchers need. These services include the provision of and access to HPC, support for research computing, RSE and data analytics, security, and governance. His focus is on understanding what researchers need and ensuring that his teams have the skills, structures, and environments to deliver the necessary services.

Skylar Wan is a lecturer in international business with a PhD and over eight years of experience working with multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the field of AI-driven consulting. Her work focuses on applying machine learning algorithms to enhance business processes, including developing applicant screening systems for major tech companies like Tencent. Additionally, she is involved in an innovative project that leverages AI to provide mental health support through a website aimed at serving adults across multiple countries. Her expertise bridges the intersection of AI, business strategy, and digital infrastructure, contributing to both research and practical applications.

Sophie Janacek works in a strategic role that supports the development of ‘underpinning’ DRI in the UK, as head of the UKRI digital research infrastructure programme. She previously worked at the EMBL-EBI as head of their research management office, which gave her good exposure to a range of issues affecting people trying to run DRIs, as well as high-level technical aspects of data infrastructure. Prior to EMBL-EBI, she worked at the Earlham, another data-intensive research infrastructure, as a scientific project manager.

Stephanie Thompson was previously a researcher. Since 2017, her role involves engaging with researchers to ensure they are aware of all the advanced computing facilities available to them and advising on research data management. In response to researchers’ needs, she is expanding the delivery of training workshops, which include how to use the HPC facility, as well as Software and Data Carpentries for a range of disciplines. She established and leads the BEAR Champions group, a voluntary team of researchers who help spread the word about the use of HPC and secure data storage, and support people from their discipline in using HPC.

Stephen Longshaw is the Director of the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) and a Principal Computational Scientist. CoSeC is a long-term programme run within UKRI STFC National Labs and is funded directly by the UKRI DRI programme as well as through EPSRC, BBSRC and MRC. The Centre funds and supports collaborative computational communities across many of UKRI's remits and provides a stable supporting mechanism for the careers of between 60 and 80 Research Technical Professionals at any one time.

Stephen Mander has been a Post Graduate research student. He has had first-hand experience using different HPC offerings with very limited RSE support and has developed good working relationships with the two people in RSE roles at Lancaster. He has recently switched hats and joined the RSE team himself. This has led him to invest more in PGRs and help others overcome the hurdles he faced during his own research.

Stewart Clark is a professor of computational physics at Durham University specialising in theory and computational methods of electronic structure. He is chair of the EPSRC-funded CCP9 computational programme on electronic structure and deputy director of the N8 Centre for Computationally Intensive Research (CIR).

He specialises in high-performance computing methods for electronic structure and has been involved with UKRI in the design and procurement of national HPC facilities.

Tobias Weinzierl is a Professor in High-Performance Computing (HPC) in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. After studying Computer Science with a minor in Maths, he obtained a Dr. rer. nat. (German PhD) as well as a habilitation (venia legendi) in Computer Science from Technische Universitat Munchen. In Durham, he serves as head of the Scientific Computing research group, has been the inaugurate director of the Master in Scientific Computing and Data Analysis (MISCADA), and is the PI or Co-I on multiple HPC projects tied to the UK’s exascale programme ExCALIBUR and Archer2’s eCSE programme. Tobias heads the UK’s first Intel oneAPI Centre of Excellence and is co-director of the Institute of Data Science focusing on HPC and HPDA.

Tobias is particularly interested in efficient ways to translate state-of-the-art algorithms – multigrid, higher-order DG or SPH formalisms – into fast code that fits modern architectures, and how to create performance-portable algorithms and code. Where possible, his work feeds into open-source software.

Tristan Martin

Wil Mayers