Skip to main content

Dr. Duncan Hull

Hello

Hello my name is Duncan, this is what I look like now (left) and when I was a longer-haired undergraduate (right). I'm a lecturer here in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

Figure 0.1: Hello my name is Duncan, this is what I look like now (left) and when I was a longer-haired undergraduate (right). I’m a lecturer here in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

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:

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 the story?

What’s the 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 the greek language and culture, preferably on a beach or taverna in Greece. Άντε γειά! 🏖️🇬🇷