People

Neil Chue Hong

Director

Neil Chue Hong is the Director of the Software Sustainability Institute. He is responsible for representing the Institute and the interests of UK researchers at a national and international level. Within the organisation, he oversees operations, leads policy development, develops and manages collaborations, and acts as the principal liaison with stakeholders.

From 2007-2010, Neil was Director of OMII-UK, which provided and supported free, open-source software to the UK e-Research community. During this period, he was also Technical Manager of the JISC-funded NeISS social simulation project and the Project Manager of the JISC-funded ENGAGE initiative. Neil has worked with researchers from across the UK and internationally to address barriers to the use of e-Infrastructure in research domains such as  biosciences, chemistry, digital humanities, Earth systems modelling, medicine and the social sciences.

Neil has extensive experience of running large scale project and EU projects. He led the Data Access and Integration Projects (OGSA-DAI and DAIT) and was a workpackage leader of the EU FP6 NextGRID project. He is on the project board of several, large, international projects (ADMIRE, nanoCMOS and the Open Grid Forum).

Neil has worked extensively with Scottish SMEs, primarily on database and image-processing projects, and completed an MPhys degree in Computational Physics from the University of Edinburgh.

Steve Crouch

Software Architect

Steve Crouch assists researchers and their communities by advising, evaluating and consulting on software that is integral to their research.

He is involved with a number of working groups in the Open Grid Forum, where he co-chairs two working groups in the areas of grid interoperability and data movement.

Previously, Steve was a software architect for OMII-UK. In this role, he was responsible for coordinating the software-evaluation activities of the Commissioned Software Programme.

Steve was awarded his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southampton in 2001.

David De Roure

Co-investigator

David De Roure is Professor of e-Research in the Oxford e-Research Centre, where he has a coordinating role in Digital Humanities, and is National Strategic Director for Digital Social Research.

Focused on advancing digital scholarship, he has worked closely with multiple disciplines including bioinformatics (in silico experimentation), chemistry (smart labs), environmental science (sensor networks), social sciences (social statistics, behavioural interventions and social machines) and digital humanities (computational musicology). He has an extensive background in distributed computing, Web, Linked Data and social computing, and runs the myexperiment.org social website for sharing scientific workflows and promoting new forms of scholarly communication.

David has been closely involved in the UK e-Science programme, is chair of the UK e-Science Forum, a Co-Director of e-Research South and was Chair of OMII-UK. He is a champion for the Web Science Trust and in 2011 was elected as a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Member of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.

David is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College and a member of the Wolfson College Digital Research Cluster.

Carole Goble

Co-investigator

Carole is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is Principal Investigator of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects.

Her academic career has been spent at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She gained her Bachelor of Science degree in computing and information systems from 1979 to 1982, joined the academic staff in 1985, and became a professor in 2000.

Her current research interests include Grid computing, the Semantic Grid, the Semantic Web, Ontologies, e-Science, medical informatics and Bioinformatics. She applies advances in knowledge technologies and workflow systems to solve information management problems for life scientists and other scientific disciplines. She has successfully secured funding from the European Union, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US and most UK funding agencies including the EPSRC, BBSRC,[24] MRC, the Department of Health, OMII-UK and the Department of Trade and Industry.

Carole was recipient of the first Jim Gray e-Science Award in December 2008.

Simon Hettrick

Policy and communications manager

Simon is responsible for the public face of the Software Sustainability Institute. He ensures that researchers and software developers know about the Institute's successes and the services it provides.

Simon chairs the Institute's publicity committee, which develops strategy for publicising the Institute's work. He manages the Institute's websites, social media and publicity campaigns. Simon writes press releases, publicity materials and blog posts, and edits copy written by staff and other contributors.

Every year, Simon runs the highly popular Collaborations Workshop, which is an unconference event that brings together researchers and software developers so that they can work together to solve research problems.

Simon manages the Agents network, which is a group of early career researchers selected from a wide range of disciplines. The Agents gather intelligence and provide their insight into the latest developments in research and software.

Before working for the Software Sustainability Institute, Simon coordinated publicity for OMII-UK. Prior to this, he worked in patent law. Simon was awarded his PhD in Laser Physics from the University of Southampton in 2004.

Mike Jackson

Software Architect

Mike assists researchers and their communities by developing, supporting and assessing their software. He also develops guides on best practice and delivers training.

Mike has worked for EPCC at the University of Edinburgh since 2001. After developing scheduling software for a local company, he spent eight years as a software developer, and then technical lead, on the OGSA-DAI project.

On OGSA-DAI, Mike undertook extensive Java development, JUnit testing, wrote ANT build scripts, used SVN for version control and developed a test system in Ruby. He also contributed to OGSA-DAI’s migration to an open-source project hosted on SourceForge.

Mike has led EPCC's involvement in data-management, linked data and Grid projects, including MS.NETGrid in 2003, OGSA-DAI in 2007-2009 and SPQR in 2011.

Mike contributes to EPCC's MSc in High Performance Computing. He organises a programming skills course and is lecturer on a software development course, which covers build management, usability, open-source software and software sustainability.

Since joining the Institute, Mike has worked with BRIC on porting their software to C++ and setting up their SourceForge project; with MAUS, undertaking Python development. He has run technical sessions at workshops including Effective Scientific Programming, Digital Social Research and Dev8D.

Mike gained his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Napier University in 1999.

Mark Parsons

Co-investigator

Mark is EPCC’s Executive Director (Research and Commercialisation) and also the Associate Dean for e-Research at the University of Edinburgh. He has many interests in distributed computing ranging from its industrial use to the provision of pan-European HPC services through the PRACE Research Infrastructure. His research interests include highly distributed data intensive computing and novel hardware design.

Mark Parsons graduated from The University of Dundee in 1989 with a BSc in Physics and Digital Microelectronics. Moving to The University of Edinburgh, he gained an MSc in IT: Parallel Systems Engineering and completed a PhD in Particle Physics in 1994, based on work undertaken on the LEP accelerator at CERN in Geneva.

Mark joined EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, in 1994 as a software developer working on several industrial contracts before becoming the Centre's Commercial Manager in 1997, and subsequently Commercial Director. In 2001, EPCC successfully bid with The University of Glasgow to establish the UK National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh, and Mark also became Commercial Director of the NeSC during the decade of its operation.

Shoaib Sufi

Community Liaison

Shoaib recruits and manages a network of Senior Scientific Advisors from the research community and liaises between this group and the Agents network. These networks brings timely and relevant information to the Institute to help guide the domains, the research and, ultimately, the software products that will lead to the most benefit through sustainability engagements with the Institute.

Shoaib has specific interest in building, managing and sustaining high-performance teams, distributed agile project management and the promotion of technical best practice in software products for use in research.

Shoaib Sufi is a project manager by practice and training (holding a PMI PMP), he also works in this capacity at the myGrid group at Manchester University and formerly worked in the Data Management Group at STFC as a project manager and metadata architect (CCLRC Scientific Metadata Model v2) and originally as a developer. Prior to this he worked in the commercial sector as a systems programmer developing middleware.

He graduated as a computer scientist from the University of Manchester in 1997.

Alumni

Malcolm Atkinson

Co-investigator

Malcolm Atkinson is now retired. He was Director of the e-Science Institute, the UK's e-Science Envoy and played a leading role in OMII-UK. Malcolm was on the advisory boards of GOSC, NCeSS, Baltic Grid and GEON and lead training and education in two EU-funded projects EGEE-II and ICEAGE. He was also a member of the Global Grid Forum Steering Group and Data Area Director for GGF.

Malcolm began his career in computing in 1966. He has worked at seven universities: Glasgow, Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, UEA, Cambridge, Rangoon and Lancaster, and for two companies: Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) and O2 (an Object-Oriented DB company in its early years in Versailles). He led the development of the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow and is now Professor of e-Science in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and has more than 130 publications. Malcolm has taken leading roles in national strategic research and infrastructure committees.

Rob Baxter

Development Manager

Rob Baxter is Development Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute. In this role, he manages the setup, tracking and conclusion of the rolling portfolio of software projects and consultancy-based activities that are central to the Institute's mission.

Rob has extensive EU project experience, both in writing proposals and in co-ordinating and managing their successful delivery (ADMIRE, EUDAT).

Rob is the Software Development Group Manager at EPCC where he oversees a broad range of novel technology projects in distributed computing and data management. Previously, he worked for OMII-UK as Project Manager on the OGSA-DAI project.

Rob has a background in programming scientific and engineering applications to run on large computers. Prior to this he was a theoretical physicist, receiving his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1993.