Andrew Smith
Research Data Scientist
Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolAndrew Smith is a research data scientist with 16 years of experience blending geospatial science, humanitarian tech leadership, and software engineering, currently at the Alan Turing Institute. He progressed through technical and leadership roles at MapAction—rising from volunteer to Head of Technical Development—delivering mission-focused GIS systems and technical project leadership. With a PhD in Water Resource Engineering and an MSc in GIS, he pairs deep domain knowledge with practical engineering skills across back-end development and test automation. He contributes to impactful open-source projects like a-b-street, improving simulation test quality and adding transport-relevant features, reflecting a focus on maintainability and real-world urban mobility tools. Based in Newcastle, he brings a rare mix of research rigour, humanitarian impact experience, and hands-on codecraft to multidisciplinary data science challenges.
16 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
PhD, Water Resource Engineering, PhD, Water Resource Engineering at Newcastle UniversityBA, Natural Sciences, BA, Natural Sciences at University of CambridgeMSc, Geographical Information Systems, MSc, Geographical Information Systems at University of Leeds
Github Skills (7)
rust10
testing10
refactor9
refactoring9
test-automation7
openstreetmap7
traffic-simulation7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
a-b-street/abstreet
Apr 2023 - Oct 2023
Transportation planning and traffic simulation software for creating cities friendlier to walking, biking, and public transit
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:19 reviews, 3 PRs, 38 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:Andrew primarily focused on improving the quality and maintainability of the codebase. They simplified test return types and removed old code, indicating efforts to refactor and clean up the existing tests. The user also added new functionality by incorporating turn restriction signs and applying code formatting, demonstrating a mix of feature additions and code hygiene.
gametransportationtransportation-planningsimulationpublic-transit
Living-with-machines/alto2txt
Jan 2022 - Jul 2022
Convert ALTO XML to plain text + minimal metadata
Contributions:63 commits, 6 PRs, 28 pushes in 5 months
altoxmldigital-humanitiesalto-xmlmetadata
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.