Computational Scientist Summer Placement

at  Science and Technology Facilities Council STFC

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES COUNCIL

Salary: £20,650
Hours: Full time
Contract Type: Fixed Term for 9-12 weeks
Location: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Harwell, Oxfordshire
Interviews: The recruitment process involves a technical interview only that will take place virtually in April 2024
Start: June 2024
The ISIS Neutron & Muon Source is a world-leading centre for research in the physical and life sciences at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford in the United Kingdom. Our suite of neutron and muon instruments gives outstanding insights into the properties of materials at the atomic scale. We support a national and international community of more than 3000 scientists for research into subjects ranging from clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care, to nanotechnology and materials engineering, catalysis and polymers and fundamental studies of materials.
We are using neutrons to investigate materials on the submicroscopic, property-defining defining length-scale. The technique called small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) enables characterising a material’s structure on the nanometer length scale. It is a versatile characterisation method employed in various research fields ranging from materials science to physics, chemistry, and biology. SANS ideally complements (surface-sensitive) imaging techniques, e.g., electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, or scanning tunnelling microscopy.
Our Computational Scientist Summer Placement will be able to work on a collaborative scientific computing project. We are an international team of developers maintaining Sasview (www.sasview.org), an Open-Source software tool to analyse small-angle scattering data.
If you are interested in practising your software engineering skills, you have the chance to be in charge of a defined scientific software development. At the end of your placement, your project will improve the functionality of the package! We will adapt the work package on the length of the placement -typically 9-12 weeks.
One of the challenges is developing an intuitive and powerful analysis tool for SANS to facilitate data inspection and efficiently uncover the information contained in data. We explore model-free tools to predict information about the microstructure of the sample from the scattering pattern, which is computationally intensive for large 2D data sets. During the placement, you will apply numerical methods for inverse problems in imaging like regularised inversion methods, Bayesian analysis, singular value decomposition and fast iterative algorithms. The aim is to implement two fast numerical methods that will enable automated data analysis.

Within this placement, responsibilities will include:

• Curiosity about software development and practising software engineering (comprising development, testing, documentation, continuous integration, and performance profiling).
• Working in a remote developer team.
• Regular catch-up meetings on-site, and online meetings with the multi-facility development team.
• Willing to produce a recorded demonstration/provide a tutorial on the newly developed functionalities.
• Experience in programming in Python and C/C++ is essential. Knowledge of multi-threaded code development and debugging (OpenCL etc.) is desirable.

You might particularly like this if you study: Physical Sciences, Mathematics, or Computer Science.