A plenary platform for new voices
Emerging Voice Plenary
The Emerging Voice plenary at RSECon24 aims to provide a platform for newcomers and emerging voices within our community to share their story and vision on research software engineering. This initiative aims to showcase fresh perspectives, encourage new voices, promote role models and foster diversity of thought within our community. By providing this opportunity, we hope to inspire and empower the next generation of leaders in research software engineering.
The Emerging Voice speakers receive professional coaching for public speaking, and mentoring from RSE leaders, to help prepare for the conference. They will be asked to deliver a 10 minute talk, with 5 minutes for audience questions.
Meet the speakers
View speaker profiles
Deborah Udoh
Registered Nurse & Research Software Engineer, Rivers State, Nigeria
Wed 4 Sept, 09:35am
G.41 (Main theatre)
Jack Atkinson
Senior Research Software Engineer, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Wed 4 Sept, 09:50am
G.41 (Main theatre)
Speaker Profiles
Deborah Udoh
Deborah Udoh, affectionately known as Debs, is a dynamic professional who seamlessly balances her healthcare expertise with her passion for technology. Currently a Registered Nurse (RN) in Nigeria, Debs is expanding her qualifications to include Registered Midwife (RM) and Registered Public Health Nurse (RPHN) at the University of Port Harcourt. Her background in healthcare brings a unique perspective to every room.
In the tech world, Debs serves as a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at OLS. Her journey into tech began serendipitously during a university strike in 2022 when her sister's gift sparked a passion for coding. With relentless determination, she trained herself on Web Development via YouTube. Eventually venturing into the open-source community, she met OLS, a nonprofit dedicated to diversifying the research landscape. In 2023, she earned a Junior Developer position.
Debs is a Carpentries Instructor and member of the Turing Way community. She epitomises grit, actively working towards levelling the playing field for other underrepresented individuals.
Her personal experiences have fueled a passion for Mental Health and community building. She envisions a future where she can integrate her roles as a healthcare professional and RSE.
Debs exemplifies the transformative power of passion, perseverance, and mentorship.
Jack Atkinson
Jack Atkinson is currently a research software engineer with a particular interest in climate science. He has a background in geophysical fluid dynamics having previously worked studying various phenomena including tropical cyclones, volcanic plumes, clouds, and space weather. Particular interests lie in the development of large numerical models and their use in understanding our planet and its future. His recent work at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science has focussed on coupling machine learning into these models to improve their predictive capabilities, and exploring software architectures to maximise FAIR principles in doing so. He enjoys working as an RSE in this area as it combines a broad range of interesting science, software, and computing.
Alongside the climate science and software Jack is a Carpentries instructor and a keen developer and deliverer of educational and training materials for researchers learning better software practices. He also organises the Cambridge RSE Seminar Series with an aim of facilitating the sharing of knowledge and connections between research software communities.
Outside all of this Jack also maintains a free open-source library for modelling and analysing archery scores used by several applications including the archerycalculator website. He has also used this code to develop progression schemes and conduct data analysis as a volunteer for ArcheryGB.