Liam Pattinson

SSI fellow

University of York

I am a research software engineer at the University of York Plasma Institute, working on the [PlasmaFAIR project](plasmafair.github.io) to improve the sustainability of software within the plasma sciences. I provide free software engineering support to research scientists at all career levels and across multiple institutions, helping to ensure their software follows best practices wherever possible and taking the ‘legacy’ out of legacy code. In practice, this includes implementing tests, adding documentation, improving user interfaces, automating development workflows, packaging software for wider distribution, and refactoring/restructuring code with long-term maintainability and extensibility in mind.

A large proportion of the software underpinning plasma physics research is written in Fortran -- the oldest programming language still in common use today. Although Fortran has been progressively modernised in recent decades, it still lags behind other languages in key areas, and much of the Fortran software still in active use is written to outdated practices and standards. As a result, I have a particular interest in improving the state of Fortran development tooling, and I created the [Fortitude](https://fortitude.readthedocs.io) linter to help automate quality control and support the modernisation of research Fortran.