Hello, World
Figure 0.1: Hello, World: my name is Duncan and I’m a lecturer here in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. This is approximately what I look like now (picture left) and when I was a longer-haired undergraduate (picture right).
Hello and welcome to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. My name is Duncan and I’m a lecturer (≈ Assistant Professor) here with responsibility for managing our Industrial Experience (IE) program. I teach undergraduate & postgraduate students, supervise tutorials & projects while serving as industrial experience & employability tutor, departmental forum chair and a member of University senate. I’m interested improving teaching, learning and the student experience by:
- Developing and delivering Coding Your Future: a course & guidebook for students at cdyf.me
- Improving students communication skills by enabling them to start writing their future, debugging their future and speaking their future
- Engaging with a wide range of employers through our industry club
- Growing and building the teaching community by journal clubbing at sigcse.cs.manchester.ac.uk and serving on the board of uki-sigcse.acm.org
- Supporting local schools both as a school governor and with the project Coding Their Future
- Teaching engineers to make better software in collaboration with our industrial mentors
- Updating students weekly on opportunities with the Wednesday Waggle newsletter at waggle.cs.manchester.ac.uk 🐝
Our elective industrial experience program has up to 100 students every year working in paid employment for the penultimate (“sandwich”) year-in-industry of their undergraduate degrees. If you are an employer who would like to recruit a summer intern, placement student or graduate please get in touch.
Full stack teaching
Regardless of the age or the stage, I enjoy the challenges of teaching and have taught english, maths, science and engineering to primary & secondary school children, undergraduates & postgraduates. In 2011, I completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at the University of Bath and worked as a high school science teacher in co-educational comprehensive (non-selective) state schools in Swindon, Shaftesbury and Stockport before returning to higher education. I serve as a school governor on the governing board of a school in Greater Manchester. As well as teaching in the UK I have also taught in India, Japan and America too. 🇪🇺🇬🇧🇮🇳🇯🇵🇺🇸
What’s Your Story?
What’s your story, Jackanory? Born in Bath, Somerset and raised using a secret West Country recipe, my story is a mixture of Natural Science (Plant Sciences, BSc), Computer Science (MSc & PhD) and software engineering. Outside of academia, I’ve worked as a consultant and software developer for BBC Monitoring, the Ford Motor Company and the National Health Service (NHS). As an academic, I have been part of the e-Science lab, Apache Taverna and myGrid projects and completed a postdoc at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) on the Pathtext project. This was followed by a short stint as a software engineer of Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, UK. 🧬👨🔬
Toolbox
This website was built using bookdown with R markdown, the R language, JavaScript, knitr, LaTeX, Pandoc, GitHub, Posit and TLC. The source code is available and the documentation in Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown. These pages are also available in one single pdf file and and an ebook. Thanks to Yihui Xie and his collaborators for the handy tools and excellent documentation. 🙏
Get a Life!
Outside of work I sing a bassy-baritone in a local community show choir, look after bees and enjoy learning greek language and culture, preferably in a Taverna or on a beach in Greece. Άντε γειά! 🏖️🇬🇷