My first research job was an ESRC-funded project on integrating spatial statistics with GIS, with applications in disease epidemiology. We explored ways of putting advanced spatial statistics into a GIS, but with the lack of even simple statistics in the GIS, we ended up putting spatial statistics into a statistics system.
Since then I have worked on many other projects, most of them applied data analysis combined with software development. I work closely with data providers and scientists to understand and model their data appropriately, and to produce results they can interpret in order to answer their research questions.
I've been writing software for spatial data and statistics for over twenty years, initially with S and Fortran, gaining experience with Unix systems and tools, and now I consider myself a strong programmer in R and Python, as well as competent in C and Javascript. I've written and contributed to several of the add-on R packages for spatial data and authored plugins for QGIS, the leading open-source desktop GIS package.
I spent three weeks working in Perth with Adrian Baddeley on integrating some of my code into
his spatstat package, and working on the fundamental ideas of spatial data in R.
As a developer of open-source geospatial software, I am active in the Open Geospatial Foundation, and was part of the team that brought the international FOSS4G conference to the UK for the first time.
The Software Sustainability Institute have a fellowship programme to promote the aims of the institute - producing high quality sustainable software environments for reproducible research. I was awarded one of the 2013 fellowships and continue to promote the goals of the institute by stressing the importance of 'open' in research whenever I can. I encourage researchers to publish their code, use reproducible research tools for their benefit as well as others, and consider using only open-source tools in their work.