Richard Gowers
Senior Software Engineer at Isomorphic Labs
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Gowers is a senior software engineer with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and over a decade of experience building high-performance scientific software and automated workflows for large-scale computational modelling. He blends research-grade coding in Python and Fortran with production engineering, contributing core backend improvements to prominent open-source projects like Fireworks and MDAnalysis. Richard has led engineering efforts at research-focused organisations and startups, shipping optimised I/O, selection logic and workflow features that make HPC pipelines more reliable and maintainable. Based in London, he’s equally comfortable diving into atomistic coordinate readers as he is refactoring backend systems for efficiency—an engineer who turns complex scientific requirements into robust, reproducible software.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Chemical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Chemical Engineering at The University of Manchester
Stackoverflow
26reputation
566reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (6)
workflow-management10
python10
mongodb-database9
mongodb9
database-design8
jupyter-notebook6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
MDAnalysis/mdanalysis
Aug 2013 - Jan 2023
MDAnalysis is a Python library to analyze molecular dynamics simulations.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 376 reviews, 1474 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Richard made significant contributions to the MDAnalysis library, focusing on the implementation and refinement of coordinate readers and writers. This included fixing bugs, enhancing the functionality of existing tools like the PDB and GRO writers, and incorporating optimizations. Moreover, the user contributed to the core functionality of the library by improving the handling of atom selections, the implementation of various calculations, and the addition of features like record type parsing and the use of MMTF files.
molecular-dynamics-simulationmolecular-dynamics-simulationspython-librarypythonscience
materialsproject/fireworks
Feb 2017 - Aug 2018
The Fireworks Workflow Management Repo.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits, 9 PRs, 17 comments in 1 year 5 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to the core backend logic of the fireworks workflow management system. Their work included refactoring code to improve efficiency, such as using generator expressions and optimizing timeout checks. They also implemented new features related to workflow management, like checking for future runs and rerunning child processes. Furthermore, the user fixed bugs and updated the codebase to be compatible with Fabric v2, ensuring the project's maintainability.
repo-managementfireworksworkflow-managementworkflow
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