Chris Richardson
Research Software Engineer at University of Cambridge
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolChris Richardson is a Research Software Engineer based in Cambridge with 14 years of experience bridging scientific research and robust software tooling. At the University of Cambridge he supports EPSRC-funded projects, applying a PhD-level grounding in physical sciences to production-ready code and reproducible computational workflows. An active open-source contributor to the prominent Spack package manager, he focuses on backend work that improves package integration for the FEniCS ecosystem, adding compiler and library support and smoothing complex build processes with Python and CMake. He combines deep domain knowledge with practical engineering—ensuring research software is portable, maintainable, and compatible across diverse HPC toolchains.
14 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Physical Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Physical Sciences at University of Cambridge
Github Skills (6)
build-tools10
cmake10
python10
package-management10
scientific-computing9
hpc8
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
spack/spack
Aug 2020 - May 2022
A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:38 reviews, 13 commits, 17 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Chris primarily contributes to the Spack package manager, focusing on integrating and updating packages, particularly within the FEniCS ecosystem. Their work involves modifying package definitions to include dependencies, update versions, and correct build processes. They also add support for different compilers and libraries, such as Allinea and xtensor, expanding the functionality of the package manager and ensuring compatibility with various tools. The user's changes involve Python and CMake, key to building and managing the packages within the Spack framework.
compilerspythonradiussplatformslinux
mscroggs/bernstein-experiment
Oct 2022 - Jan 2025
Contributions:2 PRs, 20 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 3 months
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