Our team

I have been working on parallel computing for some 35 years, and joined EPCC in 1993. I am currently the Service Director for the UK’s national HPC facility, ARCHER2. In this role, I am responsible for ensuring that ARCHER2 delivers a high-quality service to all users.

As Commercial Manager for EPCC, my role is to raise awareness of the excellent work that we do and to make sure that our clients and collaborators are satisfied with the consultancy and computational services we provide. Occasionally, I act as a project manager (especially for shorter-term industry projects). This helps me to keep my technical knowledge up-to-date which, in turn, ensures that I can provide expert advice to companies considering working with us.

I joined EPCC in 2019 as an Application Developer, and have been working as part of our Commercial Group since 2022.

I graduated from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 1994 in Pure Chemistry. From 1994 to 1997, I carried out a PhD, also in the Chemistry Department at Strathclyde University.

Ritchie Somerville joined EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, in 2023 as Deputy Director. He joined having previously been Head of Strategy for the Data Driven Innovation Programme, a joint venture between the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, funded as part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal.

My interests are based around computational fluid dynamics and I have recently been closely involved with co-workers in the School of Physics in the development and implementation of novel lattice Boltzmann techniques for complex mixtures of fluids and particles.

I joined EPCC in May 2022 as a Project Officer for Software Sustainability Institute. I have an MBA with majors in Supply Chain and Marketing and a bachelor’s degree in business administration with majors in Marketing. I have previously worked for an educational institute in London managing grants for research, running short courses and other educational projects.

For the last 7 years, I have worked as an Enterprise and Platform Architect for a variety of companies in the private sector, focusing mainly on containerisation and Cloud enablement. I currently work on the EIDF GPU platform.

I was a founding member of EPCC, and in 1995, became its Director. During my tenure as Director, EPCC was rated as the finest example of commercialising the science base in Scotland, and it became one of the top centres for computational science in Europe, hosting some of the most powerful HPC facilities in the world - success that continues to the present day.

I joined EPCC in 2008 as a member of the User Support and Liaison Team. My work is centred around helping researchers get the most from computing facilities hosted by EPCC and elsewhere.

Dr Jano van Hemert, FRSE is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Senior Member of IEEE.  He has worked in several universities and companies where he always collaborated at the interface of academia and industry. His main interest is in processing data to distil information into the knowledge required to drive positive impact.

I joined EPCC in 2006 after studies in Medical Informatics (University of Heidelberg) and Computing (Napier University), and completing a PhD in Music & Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. My main research interests are in the fields of energy efficiency in HPC, software performance analysis and optimisation, and novel hardware.

I joined EPCC at the end of 2015 after a PhD and postdoc position in Gravitational Wave Astrophysics, where I developed image analysis pipelines for rapid telescope response. During my time at EPCC I have been involved in a variety of data science projects such as developing genomics pipelines, creating a tool to manage high speed cameras, and working with satellite data processing facilities on cloud infrastructure. I am currently working with the Scottish Government to help develop and maintain an Analytical Workbench service for public sector collaboration. 

I started working at EPCC managing the frontline user support team for ARCHER in 2015.  Prior to this I have had a varied career in the public and private sector in user support, PRINCE 2 project management and ISO 9000 quality management, following on from a degree in mathematics.  I am originally from Bristol but home is very much in Edinburgh.

 

Following a chemistry degree at Bangor University, I completed an MSc at the University of Sheffield and a PhD in the School of Ocean & Earth Sciences at the University of Southampton, where I modelled nutrient cycling and early diagenesis in the sediments of shelf sea environments. I then spent a few years working in scientific software development, firstly at STFC and then at the British Oceanographic Data Centre before joining EPCC as a Data Science Applications Consultant in July 2018.