Teaching Staff

The mandatory courses in the MSc are taught by staff from the Schools of Physics and Astronomy and Informatics.

Bob MannBob Mann is the MSc Programme Director and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy. He is the Course Organiser of three of the mandatory courses -  Introduction to Scientific Data; Topics in Distributed Scientific Computing; Project Preparation (Distributed Scientific Computing) - and one optional course (Virtual Observatory), as well as organising the Individual Research Projects.

Bob is an astronomer, whose research interests focus on observational cosmology and the study of the evolution of galaxies. He leads the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit, which is part of the University's Institute for Astronomy, and which curates sky survey data for the astronomical community. A former Research Leader at the National e-Science Centre, he is active in the development of the  global Virtual Observatory, and has a long-standing interest in the application of computer science techniques in astronomy.

David Fergusson is the Deputy Director for Training, Outreach and Education at the National e-Science Centre. He is the Course Organiser of three of the mandatory courses: Web Programming; Internet Computing; and Computing with Distributed Resources.

David is involved in the European Grid Initiative as a UK representative and chairs a group in the Open Grid Forum.  He has been part of the group running the International Summer Schools on Grid Computing for several years, and founded the Biomedical Grid Summer School.

Phil Clark Phil Clark is a Lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy and is Course Organiser of the Introduction to Java Programming course. Phil is an experimental particle physicist, working on experiments at CERN and SLAC, and is Project Leader of ScotGRID, which provides a national grid service for researchers in Scotland.

Jim Bednar Jim Bednar is a Lecturer in the School of Informatics and is Course Organiser of the Software Architecture, Process and Management course. His research concentrates on biologically realistic computational modeling of the human visual system.