James Hetherington

I am the Director of Digital Research Infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation. I lead on strategy for the software, supercomputers, skills, data services and clouds that underpin computational science and digital scholarship in the UK. Previously, I was the Director of Research Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. I directed the "Tools, Practices and Systems" research programme within UK Research and Innovation's strategic priority programme "AI for Science, Engineering, Health and Government". In that role, I led a team of research software engineers and data scientists contributing to a huge range of data- and compute-intensive research. The team continue to build and use tools to analyse and present large datasets, and create complex models running on state of the art supercomputers. I was the founding head of UCL’s Research Software Engineering Group, the first such group in the UK. Fields addressed included ancient Mesopotamian history, graph theoretical approaches to modeling chemical catalysis, intensive care big data, compressive sensing for the Square Kilometer Array, the history of trans-oceanic journalistic exchanges, data centric engineering, brain blood flow simulations and DNA crime scene analysis statistics.