Senior Research Software Engineer, Imperial College London

Irufan is a Senior Research Software Engineer in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial. His work focuses on the development and maintenance of computational research software. He also provides support for researchers on software engineering best practices for sustainable and reproducible research. 

Before joining academia, Irufan worked a decade in industry, primarily as a software engineer developing commercial computational fluid dynamics software. He holds a PhD in computational combustion from Cambridge, and an undergraduate degree in Aeronautical engineering from Imperial. 

As a 2025 CoSec fellow, Irufan will pursue two objectives. First he will seek professional development in non-traditional architectures (such as FPGAs)  by attending targeted workshops. He wants to explore their potential for reducing the carbon footprint of scientific computing and preparing research software for heterogenous platforms. Second he will focus on community engagement by organising workshops for new and potential users of the computational codes that he develops, lowering the barrier to entry for students and researchers. 

Interesting fact: Irufen took a detour from his engineering career path to complete an MBA and work as an Operations Manager at Amazon, where he managed a team of over 300 people.