The Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) is delighted to announce the appointment of Jack Atkinson, Marion Weinzierl and Tom Meltzer as Principal Research Software Engineers.
The Principals will share line management of the rest of ICCS’s team of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and will have responsibility for these themes: Science and Modelling (Jack); Team, Community, and Collaborations (Marion); Software Engineering Tools and Practice (Tom), although all three will be involved in all aspects.
RSEs are a vital part of ICCS. Through close collaboration with our research partners they bring a rich mixture of scientific domain knowledge and software engineering best practices to deliver better scientific software.
Meet our new Principals
Dr Jack Atkinson has a background in geoscientific modelling working as a researcher with a number of different geoscientific codebases prior to joining ICCS. This, coupled with interests in computing, producing quality software for research, and improving research-to-operations led him to become an RSE. Since then he has worked on several projects, notably leading the FTorch project facilitating hybrid numerical-ML modelling across many codes. He will work closely to understand the scientific needs of teams and collaborate with both the scientific and RSE communities.
Jack said: "I am looking forward to helping steer the scientific direction at ICCS, understanding how to best support climate research with the team’s diverse areas of expertise." Find out more about Jack on his website.
Dr Marion Weinzierl has a background in Scientific Computing and is leading various initiatives in the national and international RSE, Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) and HPC (High-Performance Computing) communities. She is championing knowledge exchange in the DRI space as Co-Investigator on the Computational Abilities Knowledge Exchange UKRI DRI grant. Being responsible for Team, Community and Collaborations, she will look into strengthening connections within the team as well as with the wider research and Research Technical Professionals community.
Marion said: “We have a great team with a range of knowledge and backgrounds. I am excited to help shape how we work with the research and DRI communities in Cambridge, the UK and internationally.”
Dr Tom Meltzer's primary interest is in HPC. This includes all aspects from software development, project management and architecture to performance analysis, profiling and debugging. He is leading the generative AI strategy for ICCS and the wider university, in collaboration with 3 other VISS centres, to shape which tools, workflows and infrastructure we need to support climate science now and in the future. He is the author of mdb, an MPI-aware debugger which supports a variety of languages (C/C++, Rust and Fortran) and hardware (CPU and GPU).
Tom said: "The team at ICCS provide an essential service to the climate and weather community, ensuring research software is using the best software engineering practices. I am enthusiastic about sharing our knowledge and expertise in high-performance computing to not just make research software more robust, but also more performant.”
Chris Edsall, ICCS Co-director (Research software engineering), said: "We’re delighted to be able to develop the careers of our three great Principal RSEs. Marion, Tom, and Jack bring a wealth of knowledge and experience from both their time in ICCS and previous work. All three have complementary skills that will help advance the goals of the Institute and our partner organisations."
About ICCS
Computational modelling is key to climate science. But models are becoming increasingly complex as we seek to understand our world in more depth and model it at higher fidelity. ICCS supports and empowers climate scientists by accelerating their research through the development of innovative tools and models in computational science, data science and machine learning.
The institute comprises a collaboration between Cambridge Zero, the Departments of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (host department of the institute), Computer Science and Technology, and University Information Services at the University of Cambridge.