Garth Wells
Deputy Executive Chair at Jesus College Cambridge
Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGarth Wells is a seasoned academic leader and applied mechanics expert with over 20 years’ experience, currently serving as Deputy Executive Chair at EPSRC and Hibbitt Professor of Solid Mechanics at the University of Cambridge. He combines high-level research leadership—as a member of the University Council and former Deputy Head of Engineering—with hands-on computational engineering work, contributing to foundational open-source projects such as FEniCS, PETSc and Spack. His technical contributions span numerical methods, solver integration and reproducible scientific software, including practical improvements to mesh IO, Hypre solver bindings and package build systems. A proven educator and course materials author, he has also structured introductory computing resources for Cambridge engineering students. Unusually for someone at this senior leadership level, he remains active in low-level backend development and package management, bridging policy, research strategy and software engineering.
20 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Bachelor of Engineering (BE) at The University of Western AustraliaDoctor of Philosophy (PhD), Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at Delft University of Technology
English, Dutch
Stackoverflow
101reputation
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Github Skills (29)
dependency-management10
markdown10
c-language10
matrix10
python10
cmake10
petsc10
package-manager-tool10
mat10
markdown-it10
jupyter-notebook10
build-tools10
package-manager10
cprogramming-language10
scientific-computing10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
CambridgeEngineering/PartIA-Computing-Michaelmas
Aug 2016 - Oct 2022
Activities and exercises for the Part IA computing course in Michaelmas Term
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:1 review, 89 commits, 5 PRs in 6 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Garth's contributions primarily focused on creating and adding introductory notebooks to the repository. The user added and updated multiple notebooks, including an introductory notebook, a tips notebook for Jupyter commands, and notebooks describing the structure of the course, exercises, and resources. The commits show a focus on documenting and structuring the course materials.
part-1apythonjupyter-notebookscientific-computingeducational-materials
FEniCS/dolfinx
Dec 2017 - Jan 2023
Next generation FEniCS problem solving environment
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1295 reviews, 1911 commits, 2669 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Garth contributed to the FEniCS problem-solving environment, modifying and improving existing code. Specifically, they refactored and renamed test files written in C++, and addressed issues in the custom assembler tests by handling geometry correctly. They also worked on improving the mesh function functionality and IO, including XDMF tests and code for 1D scalar vector cases and complex data.
next-generationsolvingfenicsfinite-element-methodsproblem-solving
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