About Jack Atkinson

Career journey

I enjoyed doing maths and science at school, but I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do. I ended up studying engineering and found that I quite enjoyed fluid mechanics, and specialised in that throughout my master's degree. I’m also interested in geosciences. That led me to pursue a PhD looking at fluid mechanics, with applications to the atmosphere. My Postdoctoral research looked at volcanic plumes and the ways in which ash interacts with ice, for example. I developed thermodynamics, microphysics, and synthetic radar schemes. I then went to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), where I worked with the radiation belts and the space weather group. That’s looking at electrons and the way electrons behave, following solar storms. Finally, I moved to the ICCS. All of this involved numerical and computational work within geosciences including numerical modelling and the processing of data.

My colleagues at previous positions often described me as a 'careful coder', and I was always looking to share computing knowledge amongst colleagues. Whilst working at BAS I often had discussions with colleagues about how to improve various aspects of computing/training; I just didn't know I was talking about research software engineering. As my contract was coming to an end one of my friends who worked as a research software engineer (RSE) at York Plasma made me aware of the job advert from ICCS asking for RSEs. I decided to apply, if only to get some feedback and find out if it was a career option I could be interested in, and the rest, as they say, is history.

It was a difficult decision to make, deciding to leave a research group/organisation I enjoyed working with, but having always worked on the academic track I thought trying something slightly different would provide a good experience and skills, and wondered if a slightly different working style might suit me better. I knew that I wanted to stay within the geophysical science research domain, however, so this seemed like a good way to do this. The longer contract compared to typical postdoc positions was a welcome bonus in terms of stability too.

A typical day

My day involves coding, meetings with colleagues, and meetings with project collaborators. Coding can be a variety of things from local development on a laptop to running big codes on the Cambridge HPC (High Performance Computer), and individual sessions or pair and group-programming for problem-solving and debugging. We use GitHub and GitLab a lot, following (and hopefully spreading!) good software engineering practices, so there is also time spent managing issues, pull requests, and reviewing others' code.

In addition to the core parts of my job I also spend some on outreach, teaching and preparing materials and resources for others. I recently helped put together some machine learning training for summer school workshopsand I also organise the university's RSE seminar series. Within our team I do a weekly 'nugget' to teach ICCS RSE colleagues about various basic aspects of climate science. You can find the slides on my personal website.

It's not like I spend all my time sitting indoors in Cambridge though. I have been fortunate to attend a few conferences this year to present our work and learn from others. These include the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria, PASC in Davos, Switzerland, and soon RSECon23 in Swansea.

Proud moments

I have really enjoyed sharing my knowledge of domain science with colleagues whilst at the same time learning from the specialities of others (especially machine learning and software engineering practices). I'm looking forward to continuing to learn and contribute to improving the understanding of the planet and its processes.

My hobbies

Outside of work I do archery. I am the chair of the Cambridge club and compete fairly regularly. I maintain the Archery Calculator website and contribute to modelling and developing the classification schemes for Archery GB. I also play the piano and enjoy the outdoors. Being outside walking and enjoying mountaineering led me to become a trustee for the charity Equal Adventure.