about

Mark leads the Research Software Engineering team in the Digital Institute. The team focuses on delivering software engineering expertise for research projects across the university. He graduated with a BSc in Computing from Northumbria University in 2008 followed by an MSc from Newcastle University in 2012. In 2016 he was elected as a trustee for the UK Research Software Engineering Association, contributing to the transformation of the association into a registered charity in 2018.

Since joining the university in 2012 he designed and implemented software applications for a number of research projects. Everything from the gamification of stroke rehabilitation physical therapy to mobile applications for alerting stakeholders to damage to rock art carvings and the leveraging of cloud computing to render a trillion pixel image from a vector model of Newcastle city centre.

PROJECTS

  • Rest & Be Thankful / School of Geography, Politics and Sociology

    2020-2021
    • Deployment of project infrastructure to Azure using Terraform
    • Orchestration of software stack using Kubernetes
    • Provision of serverless compute service using Kubeless

  • NU-LAB / School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics

    2020-2021
    • Deployment of project infrastructure to AWS using Terraform
    • Orchestration of CWRC stack using Kubernetes
    • Utilising CWRC for testing digital humanities pilot projects

  • FRONTCAT / School of Engineering

    2020
    • Creation of GUI for interacting with CityCAT flood model running in Azure Batch
    • Wireframe designs for feedback from project stakeholders
    • Data input flow with form validation using React

  • ePRaSE / Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals Trust

    2018-2021
    • Project management of software tasks
    • Provision of staging and production environments on Azure and in NHS
    • CI/CD Pipeline for deployment to staging using GitHub Workflows

  • CARA / School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences

    2017-2018
    • Creation of client-side only web app based on original paper-based reading test using AngularJS
    • Statistics and charts showing user performance in each section of the test
    • Generation of a downloadable PDF report from the client using pdfJS

education

MSc Internet Technologies and Enterprise Computing / Newcastle University

2010-2012

Completed modules in advanced programming, algorithms, security, information management, enterprise computing and web technologies.

technical

  • Programming:
    • JavaScript
    • TypeScript
    • HTML/CSS
    • Python
    • Java
    • PHP
    • C#.NET
  • Software:
    • Angular
    • VueJS
    • React
    • React Native
    • WordPress
    • MongoDB
    • ElasticSearch
    • Postgres
    • Terraform
    • Adobe Creative Cloud
    • GitHub Workflows
  • Topics:
    • UI/UX
    • Web Design
    • Azure
    • AWS
    • DevOps
    • Containers
    • Docker
    • Kubernetes
    • Serverless

Interests

  • I enjoy:
    • Travelling
    • Climbing
    • Hiking
    • Photography
    • Football