Our team

I am EPCC’s Director of Teaching and the Programme Director for the University of Edinburgh’s online Masters in Data Science, Technology & innovation.

I am the PI and founding Director of the Software Sustainability Institute, a national facility for research software.

I joined EPCC in February 2018, after 4 years as Head of IT for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.  Previously, among other roles, I was Service Delivery Manager in Lothian and Borders Police/Police Scotland for a number of years, managing a team of 25+ and had responsibility for delivering all IT systems and Infrastructure to support 24/7/365 operational policing.

My research spans high performance computing, data and storage, memory technologies, and application optimisation, helping to ensure large scale computing is efficiently and effectively used. Current and past application domains include computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, nuclear fusion, molecular dynamics, and discrete element modelling. I'm currently the Director of Research for EPCC, and the Co-Director of the MSc in Vision with HPC.

Prof. Mark Parsons joined EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, in 1994 as a software developer working on several industrial contracts following a PhD in Particle Physics undertaken on the LEP accelerator at CERN in Geneva.

I have been working on parallel computing for some 35 years, and joined EPCC in 1993. I am currently the Service Director for the UK’s national HPC facility, ARCHER2. In this role, I am responsible for ensuring that ARCHER2 delivers a high-quality service to all users.

Ritchie Somerville joined EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, in 2023 as Deputy Director. He joined having previously been Head of Strategy for the Data Driven Innovation Programme, a joint venture between the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University, funded as part of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal.

I was a founding member of EPCC, and in 1995, became its Director. During my tenure as Director, EPCC was rated as the finest example of commercialising the science base in Scotland, and it became one of the top centres for computational science in Europe, hosting some of the most powerful HPC facilities in the world - success that continues to the present day.

Dr Jano van Hemert, FRSE is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Senior Member of IEEE.  He has worked in several universities and companies where he always collaborated at the interface of academia and industry. His main interest is in processing data to distil information into the knowledge required to drive positive impact.