So while I have already written about my current day job role as a Research Software Engineer, you may be thinking, how did I even get to this role? What sort of scientist are you?
In high school, I enjoyed most subjects. History, Maths, Art, Graphical Design, pretty much everything (I entirely sucked at foreign languages). But for A-Levels, I was steered towards Chemistry, Physics and Maths. Now, this was partly because my mother was right - I could always delve into the arts on my own time, but sciences was a good route to a stable career. During my A-Levels I was already fairly proficient with a computer and coding - mainly thanks to writing games in Basic on my Amiga 500 (what a great machine). The advantage of these three subjects was the overlap. Maths and Physics go together well, as do Physics and Chemistry when you look at thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and Chemistry and Maths have good overlap when we consider statistics and how that is an important factor in the science of chemical reactions. In terms of learning, this meant learning less disparate things, plus not writing excessive amounts of essays.
I was accepted and took up a degree at UMIST - the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. A northern university, and one where my sister studied, it was focused on the sciences and tech - there were no courses for English or the Arts. My particular course was Chemistry with Chemical Physics. What that basically meant that for four years I studied chemistry, I was in the lab for about 12 hours a week, with about another 12 hours of lectures a week, and in the final years, I focused more on the physics of atoms, bonding, quantum mechanics and simulation. For me, this course captured everything I enjoy about maths, physics and chemistry. The hows of why chemical reactions occur. The why of matter and the crystalline shapes it forms. Coupled with this, in particular for the final years, was learning programming. I never expected myself to be a programmer, in the sense that I am now, but through my studies I learn very fast how to code in Fortran (which despite the age of it, is still used for many high-performance simulation programs that are maths intensive), modifying and then writing entirely new code for the simulation of water. I was hooked.
Passing my degree I stayed on at UMIST and with my supervisor to study for a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry. That PhD involved much more programming, more use of UNIX and servers, and learning about machine learning. Needless to say, these are themes that have remained a core part of my work, allowing me to switch from simulations of water to simulations of proteins, to simulations of solid-state materials. It's all basically just atoms and different types of bonds and the physics behind how that happens.
What has been interesting as an RSE is the transferability of all my previous skills and training. Understanding simulations, and the types that exist, is useful not just for chemistry and physics, but also engineering, or sociology. Likewise, machine learning is in every field of research these days, so my fundamental training in these tools allows me to have a good understanding of the readily available libraries available in Python (such as Tensorflow, and SciKitLearn). It's nice not having to code things from scratch every time. And while some postdocs have the chance or luck, to focus on a field of research and stay there, the fact I have jumped between different fields of chemistry allows me to work with so many researchers. even now, my very lapsed experience and training of being in a laboratory allows me to appreciate the needs of lab works for the current piece of software I am designing.
So why Computation Chemistry? I guess it allowed the most opportunities and still does. I enjoy learning to code in new languages, learning new tools, and facilitating others to use the skills that I have picked up, rather than protecting my niche.
- Chris
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