Our External Partners help to shape the CDT curriculum, and assist with the development and success of the CDT. Many CDT partners have provided placements for our students, along with valuable input to our training programme, diversity, and student development.
Student Perspective of Industry Placement
“I started my industry placement in the STFC computational biology group at the start of the 3rd year of my PhD studies in particle physics. During my placement I developed techniques and software for semantic segmentation of cryo-electron microscopy density maps. This work has been further developed since and will become available to users of the software distributed to industry and academia by the group.
The placement provided the opportunity to grow my software development skills, including use of test-driven development, contiguous integration, code review and documentation. I was grateful for the opportunity to apply and further develop my skills at implementing machine learning methods whilst working with experts in the field. I utilised all of these skills in later work during my PhD, where they proved invaluable in my neutrino detection studies for the DUNE experiment. I have gone on to return to the group as a post-doc and now work on particle picking and developing datasets for heterogeneous reconstruction algorithm development”.
Industry Perspective of placement
“Joel was the first DI CDT student to join my group at STFC (Science and Technology Facilities Council) based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. My group specialises in the support and development of research software for computational molecular biology. In particular we provide tools for solving high resolution structures of biological macromolecules using crystallography and electron cryo-microscopy experiments.
It was a pleasure working with Joel, introducing him to our field whilst taking inspiration from his work on big data and machine learning at DUNE. On completion of his PhD we were delighted that Joel could rejoin the team as a postdoctoral researcher working on heterogeneous structure determination, as part of a project funded by the Alan Turing Institute. As a high end research organisation in a competitive job market, we sometimes struggle to recruit scientists with the necessary skills. Therefore, we are particularly pleased that the CDT placement has led to a successful recruitment”. M Winn, STFC
