Meet the Champions

Dr David Wallom is the Associate Director - Innovation, at the Oxford e-Research Centre. He has been involved with e-Science since 2001. He is the Technical Director of the UK National Grid Service, PI of the UK Engineering Task Force e-Science network and Co-investigator on various projects including “e-Research South”, an EPSRC e-Science platform grant. He has had funding from a number of sources for cloud computing and its utilisation in research and infrastructure as well as a number of projects looking at ICT utilisation in the Energy industry.

  
Prof Simon Cox is director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing (MIHPC) at the University of Southampton. Simon sits on the UK EPSRC Technology Watch Panel and on the Microsoft Technical Computing Executive Advisory Council, in which CTOs of world-leading commercial and government organisations advise on long term strategy for Microsoft’s Technical Computing. He has significant experience in various applicable grid, web and Cloud-based web base computing initiatives, leading the Geodise project and Co-Directing the Regional e-Science Centre. He currently chairs the UK National Grid Service Collaboration Board.  
Dr Pamela Greenwell has 35 years of research experience in the field of molecular glycobiology, publishing in excess of 80 papers. In the last 3 years she has been involved in projects with researchers in Grid Computing at the University of Westminster The team is developing user friendly interfaces for complex molecular modelling software, and speeding the analysis process by porting applications to the GRID or desktop clusters. More recently she has simplified access to Autodock and is now undertaking studies of eco-toxicity, modelling proteins from indicator species and investigating whether these are valid to assess specific toxins.  
Dr Phil Fowler studied his EPSRC-funded PhD with Professor Peter Coveney at the Centre for Computational Science, UCL, and was heavily involved with the EPSRC RealityGrid project. An early adopter of the NGS and its most prolific user, he has followed UK e-Infrastructure from the start. Contributing to the NGS, Phil
is a member of the programme committee for the NGS Innovation Forum (2009, 2010). Using e-Infrastructure he has dramatically reduced the time required to run molecular dynamics simulations of proteins embedded in bilayers from months to days..		  
Dr Rebecca Notman holds a competitively awarded Science City Research Fellowship based in the Department of Chemistry and the Centre for Scientific Computing at the University of Warwick, as well as an honorary fellowship at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests lie in molecular dynamics computer simulations between the biological interface and synthetic materials. She has numerous publications in high impact, interdisciplinary science journals and regularly presents at national and international conferences. Furthermore, Dr Notman presented at an NGS Roadshow event at the University of Surrey in 2010 to demonstrate the impact of NGS resources in a scientific research environment.  
Dr Zhongwei Guan is Senior Lecturer for the School of Engineering, University of Liverpool. Dr Guan is a member of IOM3 and IStructE and a Chartered Engineer. He has had 20 years experience in developing and utilising theoretical analysis and numerical methods for stress analysis and has published over 100 papers. The majority of his projects have involved the use of national e-infrastructure, and he has considerable experience in using the ABAQUS finite element package installed at many UK national supercomputer sites, and also in thermal/moisture mapping of shoe climate and helmet climate using micro sensor technology.   
Dr Nicholas Holliman is a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences at Durham University, where he heads the Innovative Computing Research Group and directs research in the Durham Visualisation Laboratory. He began his research career as an IBM post-doctoral fellow and his research interest has been in binocular vision and 3D displays since 1994. The Durham Visualization Laboratory has attracted grant funding from the EPSRC, PPARC, MRC, RDA Codeworks Ltd. and the ITF. As well as his academic outputs he has over ten granted patents which are licensed to a number of the world's leading companies.