Meet the team

• Diego Alonso Álvarez

  

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  Diego Alonso Álvarez Research Software Engineering Team Lead, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  A physicist with 13 years of research experience in academia, including a PhD in semiconductor nanostructures and postdoctoral research on novel solar energy concepts and solar cells. He joined the Research Software Engineering team at Imperial College London in November 2018 and has contributed to the StrainMap, MUSE and POWBAL projects, amongst others. Diego is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, a member of the Society of Research Software Engineering, and is enthusiastic about promoting the benefits of good coding practices to other researchers. His expertise is centred around software sustainability and accessibility, especially in relation to the development of graphical user interfaces for research software.

• Chris Cave-Ayland

  

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  Chris Cave-Ayland Research Software Engineering Technical Lead, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  Chris joined the RSE Team in April 2019 after having wound his way through a variety of scientific disciplines during his career. He studied biomedical sciences as an undergraduate, completed a computational chemistry PhD with the highly interdisciplinary Institute for Complex Systems Simulation, led development on the Monte Carlo simulation code ProtoMS and worked as a computing cluster system administrator. This has given Chris an understanding of the numerical demands of a broad range of research areas and how these interact with the capabilities of modern computing hardware. Chris has most recently been working on MAGDA and the development of an RSE course for Imperial College's Graduate School.

• Adrian D’Alessandro

  

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  Adrian D’Alessandro Research Software Engineer, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  He has been a member of the team since March 2020 and has worked on projects ranging from GUI development and web dashboards to systems modelling. He previously worked as an RSE at the CSIRO in Australia, where he assisted with scientific research by developing software tools, analysing data, and improving researchers’ digital literacy. He studied Physics and Applied Mathematics as an undergraduate, then completed a Master of Science with a research project in climate science.

• Dan Davies

  

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  Dan Davies Senior Research Software Engineer, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  Throughout his interdisciplinary PhD at the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies, and subsequent postdoctoral positions, Dan has been involved in a wide range of research activities requiring a software engineering solution. These activities include setting up high-throughput calculation workflows in on-premise HPC and cloud environments, building machine learning models to discover new solar cell materials, and creating analysis tools for quantum chemistry calculations. Dan is passionate about open-source software and is a lead developer of the materials screening code SMACT. He is also enthusiastic about the role of software in education and has been involved in a number of outreach projects including the development of a tablet app for use at science festivals.

• Ryan Smith

  

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  Ryan Smith Senior Research Software Engineer, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  After completing his undergraduate in Physics at Queen Mary, Ryan went on to hone his software engineering skills in the field of mass spectrometry-based proteomics in which he completed his PhD in the development of novel computational solutions for the analysis of experimental data. It was during this time - and successive roles thereafter - Ryan developed an understanding and an appreciation of the interdisciplinary nature of research science and software engineering.

• Alex Dewar

  

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  Alex Dewar Senior Research Software Engineer, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  Alex joined the team in June 2022. He has developed software in a research context for many years and across a range of academic disciplines, including psychology, biology and robotics. His academic background is diverse: he obtained a PhD in computational neuroscience focusing on modelling insect behaviour, before working as a postdoc in bio-robotics. He enjoys writing code for interfacing with hardware at a low level and has previously developed software for a variety of systems, including drones, eye-trackers and a harmonic radar system for tracking bees. From his background in modelling, he also has an interest in designing efficient large-scale simulations.

• Callum West

  

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  Callum West Software Developer Apprentice, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  Having worked in digital marketing for 5 years, Callum recently began pursuing software development and was accepted into Imperial College’s apprenticeship scheme delivered by Multiverse. Having gained coding skills through self-teaching and a 3 month ‘boot camp’ course, Callum has joined the RSE team in October 2022 to further develop the skills he needs to forge his path in a software development career. Callum is passionate about problem-solving and the creation of functional tools, and is bringing his enthusiasm to many of RSE’s projects.

• Daniel Cummins

  

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  Daniel Cummins Research Computing Services: HPC and RSE Experience Program, ICT

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  Experience and Background

  Dan completed his undergraduate degree in physics before spending two years in the defence industry, where he worked on counter-IED and GPS anti-jam technologies. He returned to academia to obtain a PhD in astrophysics at Imperial College London, performing hydrodynamics and radiative transfer simulations of protoplanetary discs. Dan joined Research Computing Services in November 2022, and is working between the Research Software Engineering and Research Computing Platforms teams.