James joined King’s e-Research team in October 2022 to build the central Research Software Engineering (RSE) group. This group collaborates with researchers across the college, providing specialist skills in Research Software Engineering to research projects, delivering training in software engineering and data skills to PhD students and staff, and advocating for the importance of software as a critical component of modern research practice. Research Software Engineers (RSEs) represent a hybrid researcher / software engineer role, bringing together experience in software development with an understanding of the academic research process and landscape. This allows RSEs to embed fully into a research team if required, acting as collaborators rather than purely service providers.

Before joining King’s, James was Deputy Director of the Southampton Research Software Group and a Senior Research Software Engineer at the Software Sustainability Institute. In this role, he worked primarily on research software with a focus on Impact Acceleration, commercialisation, and industrial partnerships, as well as developing and delivering training to researchers across the UK and internationally. He was elected to the board of trustees of the Society of Research Software Engineering for a two-year term in 2019 and led the migration of the Society’s digital infrastructure to ensure sustainability as the Society continues to grow.

James’ research background is in computational chemistry where, during his MPhil he developed tools to assist with the generation of parameter sets for molecular dynamics simulations within the Khalid and Essex groups at the University of Southampton. During this time, he also contributed expertise in software testing to a larger shared Monte Carlo modelling code in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute and was introduced to the RSE community through this work.

Research interests:

· Research Software Engineering (RSE)

· Research evaluation, metrics, and career development

· Computational chemistry - molecular dynamics

If you would like to work with the RSE group on one of your projects or have any questions about RSE more generally, please contact us at e-research@kcl.ac.uk