David Baldwin

Role: Director of Digital Research

Responsible for supporting high-quality research and innovation applications, and research software engineering - fostering collaboration between research colleagues, IT Services and the broader University community. His role focuses on maintaining, implementing and evolving the Digital Research Strategy to include new services, high-performance compute, trusted research environments, local compute, storage, software self-service, automation and training.

Patricia Ternes

Role: Research Software Engineer Manager

Patricia leads the Research Computing Team at the University of Leeds. She has a PhD in Theoretical Physics and a Master degree in Condensed Matter Physics. She has experience in a range of activities related with sustainable and reliable software development and High Performance Computing. Her work 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).

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.

Sorrel Harriet

Role: Research Software Engineer

Sorrel joined the team in September 2024. She has extensive experience supporting learning and software delivery in academia and industry, having previously worked as a consultant, lecturer and developer. Sorrel holds a PhD in Music Technology from the University of York. She has expertise in software delivery best practices, web application development, teaching and learning. She is skilled in Python, JavaScript, databases, development tooling and shell scripting.

Andrew Harvie

Role: Research Software Engineer

Andrew joined the Research Computing team in October 2024 from the School of Chemical and Process Engineering, where he worked on automated, machine learning-directed optimisation of chemical processes. Prior to this, he worked at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, developing open-source hardware and software tools for laboratory scientists. This followed a PhD in Physics from the University of Leeds. He is skilled with Python, C/C++ and MATLAB, and has a particular interest in developing efficient code for embedded systems.

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 Computing team following his role as a Research Software Engineer on the Supercomputing Wales project at Swansea University. He completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds in 2020, with research centred on improving the transonic aerodynamic performance of large distributed propulsion aircraft. Tianyi possesses extensive expertise in high-fidelity CFD simulations for both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic research using HPC. Prior to his position at Swansea University, he worked as a Research Officer at Procter & Gamble, where he was involved in collaborative CFD modelling projects focused on 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.

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.

Martin Callaghan

Role: Research Computing Consultant

Martin was 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. His role involved Research Software Engineering, training, consultancy and outreach. He also managed 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. Martin has moved on to work as a lecturer in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.

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 was 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.

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. Mark has moved on to work as Head of Digital Policy in the IT Services at the University of Leeds.

John Hodrien

Role: Research Software Engineer

John was 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. John has moved on to work as Principal Teaching and Research Support Specialist in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds.

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.

Sean Tuck

Role: Research Software Engineer

Sean is a Research Software Engineer at the University of Leeds, working within the Data Analytics Team at Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA). His programming experience has been focused on software for data access and analysis. After completing his PhD in computational ecology, he worked at a digital agency in Leeds, doing research for private companies. Sean has used a wide range of statistical models and machine learning libraries across various research projects. The language he has most experience with is R, including R package development, with experience also using Python, SQL and to a lesser extent C#.