People

Neil Chue Hong

Director

Neil Chue Hong is the Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, and is responsible for representing the SSI and UK researchers' software interests nationally and internationally. Within the organisation, he oversees SSI operations, leads the community engagement, develops and manages collaborations, and acts as the principal liaison with stakeholders.

From 2007-2010, Neil was Director of the OMII-UK, which provides and supports free, open-source software for the UK e-Research community. During this period, he was also Technical Manager of the JISC-funded NeISS social simulation project, Project Manager of the JISC-funded ENGAGE initiative, and he worked with researchers across the UK and globally to address the barriers to the use of e-Infrastructure in research domains including biosciences, chemistry, digital humanities, Earth systems modelling, medicine and the social sciences.

Neil has worked extensively with Scottish SMEs, primarily on database and image-processing projects, and completed an MPhys degree in Computational Physics from the University of Edinburgh. His current research interests are in community engagement and development, software sustainability, and the integration and analysis of data. In his limited spare time, Neil helps run the world's oldest purpose built students union and a travelling cinema touring Scotland.

Malcolm Atkinson

Co-investigator

Malcolm Atkinson is a co-investigator of the Software Sustainability Institute. He is Director of the e-Science Institute, the UK's e-Science Envoy and plays a leading role in OMII-UK. Malcolm is on the advisory boards of GOSC, NCeSS, Baltic Grid and GEON. He leads training and education in the two EU-funded projects EGEE-II and ICEAGE. He is also a member of the Global Grid Forum Steering Group and Data Area Director for GGF.

Malcolm began his career in computing in 1966. He has worked at seven universities: Glasgow, Pennsylvania, Edinburgh, UEA, Cambridge, Rangoon and Lancaster, and for two companies: Sun Microsystems (at SunLabs in California) and O2 (an Object-Oriented DB company in its early years in Versailles). He led the development of the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow and is now Professor of e-Science in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and has more than 130 publications. Malcolm has taken leading roles in national strategic research and infrastructure committees.

Rob Baxter

Development Manager

Rob Baxter is Development Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute. In this role, he manages the setup, tracking and conclusion of the rolling portfolio of software projects and consultancy-based activities central to the SSI's mission.

Previously, Rob worked for OMII-UK as Project Manager on the OGSA-DAI project. In his spare time, he is also Software Development Group Manager at EPCC where he oversees a broad range of novel technology projects in distributed computing and data management.

Once upon a time, Rob used to write code, mostly in C and Fortran, and scale up scientific and engineering applications to run on large computers. Before even that, he was a theoretical physicist, receiving his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1993 and his Bachelor's from the University of St Andrews in 1989.

Steve Crouch

Software Architect

Steve Crouch is the software architect for the Software Sustainability Institute. He assists e-Researchers, and their communities, by providing and supporting open-source software and solutions integral to their research. He is also heavily involved with a number of working groups in the Open Grid Forum, in the areas of grid compute and interoperability, data movement and information discovery amongst others.

Previously, Steve worked for OMII-UK where he was also a software architect. Prior to that, he was OMII-UK's Technology and Commissioned Software Team Leader and responsible for coordinating the software evaluation activities across the outputs generated from the Commissioned Software Programme.

He also worked on the RICES (Reasoning about Information Consistency across Enterprise Solutions) project which was involved in providing characterisation and solutions for information consistency problems which can arise within different enterprise domains.

David De Roure

Co-investigator

David De Roure is a co-investigator of the Software Sustainability Institute. He is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and the University of Oxford. A founding member of the University of Southampton's Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group, he leads the e-Research activities and is a Director of the Pervasive Systems Centre.

Closely involved in the UK e-Science programme, David is National Strategic Director of e-Social Science, Chair of OMII-UK and a Co-Director of e-Research South. His work focuses on creating new research methods in and between multiple disciplines, and his projects draw on Web 2.0, Semantic Web and workflow technologies.

Carole Goble

Co-investigator

Carole Goble is a co-investigator of the Software Sustainability Institute. She is a full professor in the School of Computer Science in the University of Manchester, UK, where she has co-led the Information Management Group since 1997.

She has worked closely with life scientists for many years and is the Director of the myGrid project, the largest UK e-Science pilot project, which has produced the widely-used Taverna open-source software and is now part of OMII-UK. She is also the co-director of the e-Science North West regional centre.

Carole has an international reputation in the Semantic Web, e-Science and Grid communities and has led the application of Semantic Web technologies to both the Grid and e-Science, a fusion dubbed the Semantic Grid. She has produced the first reference architecture for the Semantic Grid (S-OGSA) through the Ontogrid project and chairs the Open Grid Forum Semantic Grid Group with David De Roure.

Simon Hettrick

Publicity manager

It's Simon's job to make sure that researchers know about the Software Sustainability Institute and the services it provides.

Simon chairs the institute's publicity committee which comes up with ideas and decides on strategy for publicising news about the institute's work. When not writing or editing copy for the press, the website and the blogs, Simon oversees the development of the institute's websites and designs publicity materials. He also spends far too much time trying to find images that represent software.

Simon runs the Collaborations Workshop, an annual event that brings together researchers and software developers so that they can work together on solving problems. He is also responsible for the Agents network, which is a group of experts who help the institute keep up to date by providing their knowledge and insight into the latest research.

Before joining the Software Sustainability Institute, Simon dealt with publicity for OMII-UK. He trained as a laser physicist, was drawn out of the laboratory by a position in patent law and joined the world of software in 2006.

Mike Jackson

Software Architect

Mike Jackson is a software architect for the Software Sustainability Institute. He assists researchers, and their communities, by developing, supporting and assessing their software as well as developing guides on best practice and delivering training.

Mike has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction and has worked for EPCC at the University of Edinburgh since 2001. After developing scheduling software for a local company, he spent eight years as a software developer, and then technical lead, on the OGSA-DAI project. Mike also dabbles in project management and has led EPCC's involvement in various Grid, distributed, data-management and linked-data projects. Mike also lectures and organises a course on programming skills on EPCC's MSc in High Performance Computing.

Mark Parsons

Co-investigator

Dr Mark Parsons is a co-investigator of the Software Sustainability Institute. He graduated from The University of Dundee in 1989 with a BSc in Physics and Digital Microelectronics. Moving to The University of Edinburgh, he gained an MSc in IT: Parallel Systems Engineering and completed a PhD in Particle Physics in 1994, based on work undertaken on the LEP accelerator at CERN in Geneva.

Mark joined EPCC in 1994 as a software developer working on several industrial contracts before becoming the Centre's Commercial Manager in 1997, a role he keeps to this day. With direct responsibility for industrial project development for EPCC, he has generated projects with over thirty companies in the past three years. In 2000, he assisted CERN with the preparation of the DataGrid project - one of the European Union's most important Grid development projects.

In 2001, EPCC successfully bid with The University of Glasgow to establish the UK National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh. Since August 2001, whilst continuing in the role of EPCC Commercial Manager, Mark became the Commercial Director of the NeSC.

Shoaib Sufi

Community Liaison

Shoaib Sufi is the Software Sustainability Institute Community Liaison. He recruits and manages a network of senior and junior members of the research community. The focus of this network is to bring timely and relevant information to the Institute to help guide the domains, the research and, ultimately, the software products that will lead to the most benefit through sustainability engagements with the Institute.

Shoaib Sufi is a project manager by practice and training (Prince2 Practitioner and PMI PMP), he also works in this capacity at the myGrid group at Manchester University and formerly worked in the Data Management Group at STFC as a project manager, metadata architect (lead author of the CCLRC Scientific Metadata Model v2 and its representation in the ICAT v3 schema) and originally as a developer (in Java, gaining a Sun Certified Java Programmer certification) prior
to this he worked in the airport information systems sector as a systems programmer which involved metadata driven middleware development (involving C, Unix and Oracle) and although he started as a natural sciences undergraduate switched institution and graduated as a computer scientist.