Giles Greenway - Research Software Engineer (RSE) Team Leader
Giles has been involved in Software engineering both in academia and industry. Arriving from the music business, he used Python in an AWS serverless environment for AI, data-engineering and web-scraping.
At Kings College London's Department of Digital Humanities he developed an Android app in Java for tracking the network behaviour of other apps as part of the "Our Data, Ourselves" project. This led to developing workshops in Android app-reversal that formed part of the MA teaching programme; he was also involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in Python and R. His first commercial role was in front and back-end web development in education technology.
As a former high-school physics teacher, most notably at an International School, he ran his own instance of the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) and taught at Open University Summer-Schools. He has a physics background with an MSc in Computational Physics, and a PhD in Polymer Physics from the University of Reading concerned with the relationship between microstructure and electric breakdown strength in polyethylene cable insulation, both making use of FORTRAN.
His main interests include promoting code quality, maintainability and sustainability.
Samantha Lawson - Research Software Engineer
Samantha joined the RSE team in June of 2023. She is an R programmer with experience in computational biology and multiomic cancer research. Starting as a wet bench researcher in experimental histopathology, she has crossed the divide into purely computational work.
Her interests include making bioinformatics tools more robust as the technologies advance.
She holds a BSc in biochemistry, in which she focused on drug synthesis and purification. Her MSc in bioinformatics is from Oregon Health & Science University, where she developed data-driven models of ferroptotic mechanisms in renal cell carcinoma cells.
Mathew Alexandrakis - Research Software Engineer
Matthew is an RSE member in ITS Research group at Queen Mary University of London. He is an HPC Fortran programmer with a focus on parallelisation paradigms. He also has experience with C and Matlab, alongside with code profiling, algorithm optimization, and large dataset visualisation and manipulation. He's also responsible for the sysadmin-side of the Apocrita Intel compilers as well as MPI wrappers (Intel MPI, Open MPI) and their underlying communication protocols.
His interests include different parallelisation paradigms (MPI, OpenMP, hybrid models, Fortran CoArrays) and GPGPU acceleration (OpenACC, CUDA). Considerable focus is also spent on building, code testing, documentation, maintenance, and general application of programming best practices for research software development.
He's a PhD graduate with a degree in Applied Mathematics and Computing, from the Computational and Mathematical Sciences department of University of Greenwich, where through numerical simulation he applied a multi-scale multi-physics model to study the solidification of binary alloys.
Sherman Lo - Research Software Engineer
Sherman is a research software engineer and is interested in statistics and machine learning. He is experienced with Java, Python, C++, MATLAB and R and has developed code using multiple threads and a GPU. He is also interested in hybrid programming, for example, running C++ code in R, as it would make HPC facilities more accessible to researchers across different fields.
He has completed a PhD in statistics at the University of Warwick. During the PhD, he developed statistical software for rainfall prediction, defect detection for 3D printing and Markov chains using Monte Carlo. He has also completed degrees in machine learning and physics.