About Alexander Smith

Writing computational modelling software is Alex’s bread and butter. Having developed models of organic semiconductors while completing a PhD in computational physics at the University of Bath, Alex then became a software engineer at The MathWorks, enhancing numerical equivalence simulations of code deployed on computers and embedded devices. With a blend of academic research code and professional software engineering, it was only natural that Alex became a research software engineer at Cambridge, where he could draw upon both sets of expertise to support researchers producing and maintaining scientific code.

Being somewhat of a programming polyglot, Alex contributes to Earth system models for the VESRI teams including C++ simulations of sea ice for the SASIP project and a model of carbon absorption in plants for the LEMONTREE project, written in Python. He also helps teams improve both their build and continuous integration systems and promotes strong developer-facing documentation to ensure long-term code sustainability. However, Fortran 90 is his mother-tongue, he spent a few years developing MATLAB & Simulink, he has worked on smaller projects in C#, R & HTML/CSS, and has published articles on Arduino in a national magazine. 

Alex also has a variety of other interests including writing, photography and cycling, but his true love is fruit & vegetable gardening and, more often than not, you’ll find him outside hand-weeding, pruning tomato plants, and throwing heads of lettuce to his chickens