Dr Jack Atkinson
- Principal Research Software Engineer
Contact
Location
- Roger Needham Building
- 7 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge , CB3 0RB
About
Jack is a Principal Research Software Engineer (RSE) in the ICCS, where he co-leads our team of 12 RSEs working to support a range of software projects across international climate science projects.
Jack's background is in geophysical fluid dynamics and numerical modelling, having worked as a researcher at Cambridge and at the British Antarctic Survey with various large-scale codes running on high-performance computing systems.
You might know him as:
- lead developer of FTorch, software for coupling PyTorch ML into Fortran, used across scientific computing
- editor at the Journal of Open Source Software
- fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, exploring the relationship between research publication and the software behind it
- Carpentries Instructor and teacher of software concepts to scientists
- contributor to the RSE community, organiser of the Cambridge RSE Seminar Series and co-founder of the Geoscience-RSE SIG
- convenor of scientific and computing conference sessions at EGU, PASC and more.
Because of his background, Jack is a strong believer in the importance of the 'R' in RSE and enjoys bringing both a technical and scientific understanding to the projects he works on with researchers. He is always open to discussing potential projects and opportunities for the ICCS team.
Outside of climate research Jack is a keen archer. He is a member of the Archery GB Technical Advisory Group and maintainer of the archeryutils software library and archerycalculator.co.uk providing modelling resources to the global archery community. For more information, visit Jack's website.
Research
Research interests
- Climate models
- Interfacing of model components
- Research software education
- Research software efficient design
- Rethinking relations between publication and software
Teaching and supervision
Jack has written several teaching courses that have been delivered as workshops across universities and at summer schools and conferences. These include Practical ML with PyTorch, Research Software Skills and Collaboration with git and GitHub. If you would like Jack to deliver one of these courses to your group/lab, please get in touch.
He is also a certified and experienced Carpentries instructor for delivery of various computing skills workshops. Jack has taught at undergraduate level for multiple courses including vectors and matrices, mechanics and dynamics, and fluid mechanics.
Jack has carried out previous supervision of Master's research projects in fluid dynamics and radiation belt physics, and summer projects and internships in research software and scientific research.