About the Team
Isambard Leadership Team
Simon McIntosh-Smith
It was Simon's crazy idea back in 2016 to start the Isambard series of supercomputer projects. Originally designed to provide access to advanced or emerging architectures, such as Arm, Isambard has grown from a Tier-2 (regional, i.e. GW4) project, to an International Leadership class facility with Isambard-AI. Graduating in CS, he spent 15 years in the Bristol semiconductor industry at Inmos, STMicro, Pixelfusion and ClearSpeed, before joining the University in 2009. He is a Professor of HPC and the director of the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS). When not on a plane, he's a classic geek, with an extensive Lego collection (mostly Star Wars), and is a serious Critical Role / DnD fan.
Sadaf Alam
Sadaf Alam is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Isambard supercomputing Digital Research Infrastructures (DRIs) and director of strategy and academia in the Advanced Computing Research Centre at the University of Bristol, UK. She is responsible for digital transformation for research computing and data assets management services. Prior to joining Bristol, Dr Alam was the CTO at CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. She was chief architect for two generations of Piz Daint innovative flagship supercomputing facilities and MeteoSwiss operational weather forecasting platforms. She was technical lead for European supercomputing centres’ federation project called Fenix. From 2004-2009 Dr Alam was a computer scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), USA, and a staff scientist at the ORNL Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). She studied computer science at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she received her PhD. She was a founding member of the Swiss Chapter of Women in HPC.
Christopher Woods
Christopher has a background in Research Software Engineering and Computational Chemistry. He completed his undergraduate, postgraduate and first PDRA position at the University of Southampton. It was there, in the computational chemistry group that he first built beowulf clusters and wrote HPC software for running molecular simulations. He moved to Bristol in 2005 to join the Computational Chemistry Centre. Over a number of PDRA projects, he developed lots of software and methods that are now used in commercial drug discovery. From 2014-2016 he joined the Bristol Synthetic Biology Centre (BrisSynBio) as Technical Lead and HPC Systems Administrator, during which time he joined the growing movement to develop the new profession of Research Software Engineering. In 2016 he won an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellowship, and established the Bristol RSE Group. From 2016-2023 he grew the group, and used that platform to further the cause of RSEs nationally. He was a joint chair of the UK RSE Association, and one of the founders of the UK Society of RSE. Throughout his career, he has tried to combine his passions for programming, new technology, cloud computing, and for coaxing computers to solve real research problems. Christopher is a massive fan of Formula 1, and enjoys good (vegetarian) food, quality chocolate and leisure travelling.
Dave Moore
Dave studied for their Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Plymouth and worked at the Met Office in Exeter, Devon since 2009 becoming the Supercomputer technical team leader in 2015. He has lead the delivery of multiple large Cray XC40 systems, defined the next-gen HPE Cray EX systems and helped deliver earlier incarnations of Isambard hosted at Met Office HQ. Dave joined the Isambard team in March 2024. Obsessed with computers of all sizes, collector of vintage media formats and builds the odd, usually space-themed, Lego set. Can usually be found elbow deep in a computer case or surrounded by mini PCs. Is not a cat.
Fan Yang-Turner
Fan holds a degree in Computer Science from Dalian University of Technology, China, and completed her PhD in Interactive System Design at the University of Birmingham. From 2011 to 2013, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, focusing on an EU project related to Big Data Analytics. Subsequently, she joined NHS Digital as a Technical Specialist. From 2017 to 2021, Fan served as a Lead Software Engineer at the University of Oxford. She led the development of the Scalable Pathogen Pipeline Platform (SP3), which provided an efficient and unified process for collecting and analyzing pathogen genomic data, leveraging elastic Cloud Computing. In 2019, SP3 won the Wellcome Trust Technology Innovator Award (£1M) and was utilized by TB researchers worldwide until May 2021, when it was repurposed by Oracle. For the past three years, Fan led the Data Analysis as a Service group at STFC, UKRI. In this role, she was responsible for developing the Data Analytics Platform and Services enabling researchers to access the digital research infrastructure at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory for research conducted with the ISIS Muon and Neutron Source, Central Laser Facility, and the AI for Science group.
Isambard Team Members
Ethan Williams
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla et euismod nulla. Curabitur feugiat, tortor non consequat finibus, justo purus auctor massa, nec semper lorem quam in massa.
James Womack
James joined the Isambard team in March 2024, moving from a role in University of Bristol's central Research Software Engineering (RSE) team. As a member of the Bristol RSE team, James operated and managed the team's free-at-the-point-of-use research software consultancy service, Ask RSE, enabling and supporting Bristol researchers from a variety of disciplines to develop robust, high-quality research software. James's academic background is in computational chemistry, developing software and methods for simulating molecules and materials at the quantum level. As a PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, James contributed to a range of computational chemistry software packages, many of which were designed to perform large scale parallel quantum chemistry calculations on HPC systems.
Matt Williams
Matt joined the University in 2016, coming from the University of Birmingham where he provided support for the LHC's world-wide computing platform. He worked to support the synthetic biology community at Bristol as part of the Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC). He has a strong background in Physics and computational modelling. He is especially interested in making research software more sustainable through the use of testing, version control and automation of processes. He led the software engineering teaching team in the RSE group at Bristol for 5 years. Matt is the President of the Society of Research Software Engineering, working to support and promote software-driven research.
Isaac Prior
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla et euismod nulla. Curabitur feugiat, tortor non consequat finibus, justo purus auctor massa, nec semper lorem quam in massa.
Tom Lin
Wei-Chen (Tom) Lin is a final-year PhD student with the High Performance Computing Group at the University of Bristol. His research is focused on surveying performance portability and productivity properties of emerging and established programming languages and frameworks. This work will help evaluate advances in HPC programming paradigms in an objective manner. While completing his PhD, Tom joined the Isambard team in March 2024 to witness the bring up of a new breed of supercomputers. In his spare time he usually does more HPC stuff, I guess he needs to take vacations more seriously.
Wahab Kawafi
Wahab finished their PhD in machine learning from the University of Bristol on computer vision applications in biomedicine and material science. They worked as a visiting researcher at the European Space Agency analysing motion capture data of stroke-survivors. More recently working as a machine learning engineer for robotics and aerospace applications. He joined the Isambard team in April 2024. When not coding he's usually found 3D printing at home.
Thomas Green
Tom studied Chemical Engineering at UMIST (now University of Manchester) and in 2006 joined the Met Office as part of the Unified Model Systems Team. In 2013, he joined Cardiff University as part of the Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (ARCCA) team as a parallel programmer. Whilst at Cardiff, he got involved in the Isambard project and became a central part of the team from the GW4 support effort. He joined the Isambard team at Bristol in 2024. Tom has experience in many aspects of HPC from the software side (optimising code, installing software, etc.) to the more hardware focus (monitoring hardware faults, image deployment and configuration, firmware updates, Slurm configuration, etc).
Richard Gilham
Richard completed his undergraduate degree and PhD in chemistry at the University of Birmingham, specialising in computational chemistry. In 2005 he moved to the National Physical Laboratory to work on metrology of airborne nanoparticles. In 2010, Richard moved to the Met Office where he worked in a range of roles including climate change impacts, land surface model development and optimisation of the Unified Model (UM) via reduced precision computing. From 2018 to 2024 he led the UM Systems Team, leading over a dozen release cycles and contributing to many other activities including procurement and porting to new supercomputer systems.
Anna Price
Anna joined the Isambard team in June 2024. Prior to this, she was a Research Software Engineer based at Cardiff University working with Supercomputing Wales and CLIMB-BIG-DATA primarily in pathogen genomics. At Cardiff, she was lead developer on a tuberculosis pipeline created for the UK Public Health Agencies. She was also a member of the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, working with the team at Cardiff University and Public Health Wales to respond to requests for information from Welsh Government during the COVID-19 pandemic. She studied for her undergraduate degree and PhD in physics at Swansea University. In her free time, she plays guitar and attends many gigs.
Will Wishart
Will joined the Isambard team in June 2024 from previously working at the Met Office in the HPC team for 17 years. Will has configured and supported multiple HPC systems from NEC, IBM Power, Cray XC and Cray EX systems. In his spare time, Will is a big sci-fi fan and a keen gamer with his favourite genre being action-RPG particularly ‘Soulsborne’ games. Will also enjoys building his own machines and playing on the current generation of handheld gaming PCs.
Pete Chase
Pete joined the Isambard team in June 2024. Previously he was a Storage, Virtualization & Mainframe admin at the Met Office 10 years. Prior to that he worked as a Windows and Linux admin and spent a smattering of time as a web developer, DBA, network admin, service desk advisor, and scientific software engineer. Pete started his IT career at call centre helpdesks, initially working in broadband support before progressing to laptop support, and then jobbing around as site IT admin, trainer, business continuity officer and VB6 dev. In his spare time Pete enjoys a quiet life with his cat, and can be often found walking around with a camera, disassembling wristwatches, soldering electronics kits or being mostly bad at video games.
Jake Watson
Jake joined the Isambard team in June 2025. Prior to this, he worked in various roles at Aberystwyth University's Information Services department, including IT Service Desk, Networking, and Systems. Jake also graduated from Aberystwyth University with a degree in Software Engineering. A self-proclaimed geek with a passion for computers, other STEM fields, and D&D, he enjoys a wide range of outdoor activities, with walking, climbing, and especially caving being his favorites.
Sebastian Juodaky
Seb joined the Isambard team in March 2025. Prior to this, he started his career as an apprentice at Siemens in the railway industry in October 2021 as a Network & Cybersecurity Engineer, graduating in December 2023. He's familiar with building networks (Architecture drawings, Switching and Routing, Firewalls, testing and more), aswell as creating and deploying secure configurations, security assurance testing, threat and risk analysis etc.
Currently at BriCS he's involved in working on the internal SIEM, creating cyber processes and playbooks, managing vulnerabilities and incidents and configuring and deploying security services.
Ashish Tom
Ashish completed his MSc in Data Science and Engineering at the University of Dundee before joining the Isambard team in March 2025. Prior to that, he worked as a software engineer for a system integrator in India, primarily setting up software-defined telecommunications platforms and occasionally writing code when things went sideways. When he’s not in front of a screen, Ashish enjoys listening to music or tuning in to the calls of birds while out on a walk.