Ben Huckvale Phd, Citp Email & Phone Number

Oxford, Gb

Oxford, United Kingdom

Oxford Nanopore are making groundbreaking progress towards products that will perform fully hands-off automated sample preparation and sequencing.We want to make it possible for someone with little or no lab expertise to take a raw sample (blood, food, etc.) and obtain a DNA sequence automatically within hours, at the same location, using a portable device that is accessible and not cost-prohibitive.I am responsible for delivering the software for products that incorporate digital microfluidics technology with this end-goal in mind, creating solutions for manufacturing, research and development within the company, and customer usage worldwide.I lead a team of talented software engineers to achieve this. We use C++20, Python and Typescript.

Oxford, United Kingdom

I directed the development of software for the company’s VolTRAX product, which performs automated sample preparation using the latest microfluidics technology. After getting a prototype product to market, I recruited a team and led them to develop the software for further product iterations, with a regular release cycle under Scrum. My team developed software components to enable the device to perform accurate calibrated PCR-cycling and associated preparation of COVID-19 or other samples for sequencing.The technology ecosystem we started with involved C++11 and C#, but we evolved it to remove the use of C# and moved onto C++14, and eventually C++20. We have used other tools such as conan and ansible to assist with our development experience, and Python, MongoDB and sqlite to build data analysis pipelines to support our product development.

Oxford, United Kingdom

I was made the lead software developer for the company’s VolTRAX product. I began the software project alone as a new project, but reused some of the MinKNOW software (my previous team) to shorten the time to make this into a minimal working product. A particular difficulty was having to make C++11 talk to C#/.NET libraries via C++/CLI (In hindsight I wouldn't recommend this). I built a team to take the minimal design forward to a more usable and robust one that was shipped to our early-adopting customers.

Oxford, United Kingdom

I have been responsible for carrying out major architectural, functional and refactoring changes to MinKNOW both to prepare it for market to be released in time for the MinION Access Programme and to enable it to grow beyond that. As a team, we successfully made a number of technological migrations: from C++03 to C++11. from a handcoded Visual Studio project and make build system to a Cmake build system, from SVN to Git, from Jenkins to Gitlab-ci, and from Cppunit tests to Catch tests.

Oxford, United Kingdom

I successfully delivered a working real-time analysis system for the data acquisition software of the company’s MinION DNA sequencing product. This involved liaising with researchers in other teams to implement their signal-processing algorithms in C++ to production quality standard and optimising them for best performance. I made use of the C++ STL, Boost libraries, Python, Make and Javascript. I used my experience to improve other areas of the codebase and promoted better practices. Leading by example I encouraged a test-driven development approach and took pains to improve testability and code quality.

London, United Kingdom

I was a full-stack developer in the creation from scratch of new Costing and P&L modules for the firm. I contributed principally to the Oracle Database design and SQL queries, server-side Scala business logic and C#/WPF front end. For the latter I pushed an MVVM data-driven design. It was an interesting project since I had no prior experience of these technologies. We practised agile methodologies and behaviour-driven development.

London, United Kingdom

I worked on the firm’s repo and securities finance trading platform (Anvil) which was used by major international clients. Development was in a unix environment and was principally for supporting those clients specific needs and fixing bugs or adding features to their customised systems. The software had an interesting thin client architecture that involved understanding a proprietary stack-based language and forms system. Manipulation of the backend-end database was in SQL (Sybase). There were also occasions to contribute fixes and features to C++ and Perl parts of the application. I used Perl, Bash and Python to automate tasks such as creating the client support environments needed to test and reproduce customer issues. I also co-managed an on-site upgrade of a heavily customised client installation which involved considerable and detailed interaction with client technology and business teams.

Bristol, United Kingdom

My technical project was software to control and monitor the Global Calorimeter Trigger, for the CMS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN. My system involved a Python interpreter embedded into a C++ controller application with Python scripts delivered remotely from a Java GUI client, via SOAP messaging.My physics study was of anomalous couplings of the W W gamma vertex. I adapted a Monte Carlo event generator, written in Fortran, for use alongside existing detector simulation software. I used both grid (a worldwide distributed computing system for the LHC) and local batch tools, and bash, Python, C++ and collaboration software libraries. I used my own statistical data analysis framework written in Python to perform a maximum likelihood analysis to produce confidence ellipses and plots using matplotlib, showing the sensitivity of CMS to measure the anomalous effect.I also worked as both a physics and computing lab demonstrator, tutor, and personal lab supervisor to a visually impaired student.

Mphys, Physics

Activities and Societies: Archery clubProject: Spectroscopy Part B options: Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics and Financial Market.

Phd, Particle Physics

"Anomalous WW gamma couplings and python-scripting for CMS Global Calorimeter Trigger"