Published 30th October 2024

Can you tell me about your journey to get to your current role?

My undergrad was mechanical engineering and I did a PhD in composite materials in engineering. I’m old enough that the first time I met a computer was when I went to university, when I did some programming courses in my degree, I realised that I really enjoyed writing software. In my PhD I built and developed a small filament winding machine. I worked out at that point that I was better at being a software engineer than a mechanical engineer. So I moved to the computer science department where they had an agreement with the company that I worked for to work within the drawing recognition research group. We were doing automated drawing recognition for CAD systems for industrial embroidery machines.

When my daughter was born she was very ill, she had major surgery after she was born. So I worked from home for 15 years as a part-time software engineer. One of the guys I used to work with had set up a business doing handicraft software for things like cross-stitch. So, I spent a happy few years writing software part-time for things like knitting, bobbin lace, patchwork which worked well because it was very flexible.I then had another job which was drawing recognition for travel tickets: passports, travel documents and so on. I was made redundant from that role and I finally found an advert for the job that I came back into academia with. They were looking for a software engineer to manage an open source software project, it’s called TexGen and it’s for 3D modeling of textiles and textile composite materials. 

I sort of came full circle back into the engineering department and into the composite materials group that I did my PhD in. They had funding for three years for me to work on that project and after an extension of another year’s funding I realized that although the job advert was for a software engineer, I was actually in a research fellow position. The goalpost had got up and not only moved, but moved to the other end of the pitch. I wasn’t going to get promoted to a senior research fellow because I didn’t have the publications; I was on a few publications but nothing major. I was trying to work out how I was going to make this work and then I saw the call for the EPSRC RSE fellowships. This is where I found out about this RSE community and thought this  exactly sums up my predicament and where I am, so I applied. We did this in the style of a traditional fellowship application, giving me the scope to develop TexGen. I went for the interview and thought I’d completely blown it but I got offered the fellowship. That gave me the funding for five years to develop TexGen and then I realized that it was a much bigger thing. Being part of the RSE community gave me lots of other opportunities to widen research software within the faculty. I chaired the RSE conference in 2018, which was lots of hard work but fun. 

TexGen has developed, it has users all over the world and is open source. I also  set up a research software network in the university, giving researchers across all faculties a resource and a place to  meet. In parallel to that the RSE group has started at Nottingham as well, I think they may have started looking into RSE as a result of me having the fellowship. At the end of my fellowship, I moved into an academic post. I’m now an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and basically my teaching is all software. For students I’m teaching C on a mechatronics course and MATLAB to aerospace engineers, I also run MATLAB courses and software engineering courses for the researcher academy. I’m trying to work out how to be an RSE and an academic when my output is still software? My KPI’s are papers so there’s still that sort of tension and I think that’s something that we need to think about in the community. I’m sure there are quite a lot of people who are in academic posts as opposed to research posts who are essentially RSEs and developing and maintaining software etc.. 

Is there any advice that you’d give to someone looking to do what you’ve done and become an academic who’s also a RSE, you know?

I think stick to your guns and don’t get sucked into doing other stuff that you don’t want to do. Be focused on the fact that your software is your strength and think about what you can bring in your software role that maybe isn’t known or used by people in the group, in the department and so on. I suppose focus on attributes that you can bring that maybe aren’t the standard.