About Me / CV

I'm a Computer Scientist with a PhD in CS from 2008, which was focused on machine learning back just before the GPU & deep learning explosion. Since then I've moved between the bioinformatics and HPC fields, across academia and industry, in both the UK and USA.

Experience

I have 14 years experience, post PhD, across various fields:

• Containers, Go, Web Services - I currently work from home, for a fully remote startup, developing a container platform and surrounding services focused on HPC use.
• HPC & Scientific Development - I spent a total of 4 years in the High Performance Computing group at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Though chiefly leading web/scientific software development projects, I contributed significantly to all aspects of the HPC service, including system administration and user training.
• Bioinformatics - I worked for 6 years at the University of Oxford and UT Southwestern Medical Center in proteomics bioinformatics. I supported proteomics services, developed analysis tools and workflows, and carried out computational proteomics research. My publications are listed on Google Scholar.
• Machine Learning - I received a PhD from the University of Exeter in 2008, for work concentrating on the development of novel neural-network methods for protein sequence classification problems.

Skills

My skills are strongest in:

• Go development - including backend web services and container tooling.
• Python web and scientific development - including Django, Celery, SciPy.
• Containers - I have strong interests in the practical use of containers across platforms, especially in batch & data analysis / ML workloads.
• Reproducible science & workflows - Including pipeline platform development, Nextflow.
• Training / teaching - I enjoy teaching and have contributed many session covering programming, machine-learning, HPC, containers
• Machine Learning - I have a PhD backround in neural networks and ML fundamentals, and am currently updating my knowledge of the latest DL frameworks.

Other Interests

Aside from work things, my interests include:

• Music of all kinds. I've re-kindled an interest in vinyl and 90s dance music recently, but am a big fan of alt/indie too. I am attempting to re-learn the piano, and really need to buckle down to learning the guitar!
• Beer and making BBQ - both good things to enjoy when living in Texas.
• Gardening and cycling, to hopefully balance out the beer and BBQ :-)
• Open science and reproducibility efforts.
• Supporting free & open source software.