Senior Research Software Engineer, National Oceanography Centre

Esther’s background is originally in particle physics, having done her DPhil in this field, and she has since worked in research software engineering across fields including climatology, meteorology, national infrastructure and, currently, oceanography.  

As a senior research software engineer at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), she provides software development expertise to a wide range of projects. She is also involved in building a Data Science Platform, which will be an underpinning piece of infrastructure at NOC, providing an easy and uniform way to access compute for NOC’s researchers. 

Esther is passionate about trying to improve researchers’ experiences when working with software and accessing compute, which is at also at the heart of CoSeC’s goals. She currently spends a significant amount of her time organising, delivering and helping with software workshops at NOC. During this fellowship, she plans to create and run a series of very short courses and targeted code surgeries around common issues faced by researchers. 

As the majority of Esther’s career in research software has revolved around the geosciences, she is keen to use this fellowship to share learnings from the geoscience community as well as learn from other domains involved in CoSeC communities. 

Interesting fact: Esther’s career path in research software traces back to hr DPhil, which involved spending a fair bit of time 2km down an active nickel mine in northern Ontario, Canada.