Will Furnass is Senior Research Platforms Engineer at the University of Sheffield. This involves helping develop and maintain HPC and storage infrastructure and services, and also building platforms to allow researchers to run workloads (inc those involving sensitive data) in the cloud.

The path to this point has not been particularly direct: he has a computer science degree, has worked as a IT systems engineer in the film industry, has a PhD plus post-doc experience in water engineering (where he developed semi-physical and data-driven models of water quality in water distribution networks) and has provided support to the users of the University of Sheffield’s high-performance computing clusters.

More recently, he was a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at U. Sheffield for several years.

In addition he has taught or helped run RSE, water engineering and study skills workshops. His interests include helping researchers optimise data analysis workflows (primarily using higher-level languages), providing training in RSE best practices and systems administration.