The Team

Victoria Bennett leads the CEDA Division within RAL Space. Her responsibilities include programme and people management, interfacing with RAL Space, NCEO and NCAS, and developing and implementing CEDA strategy.

She holds a DPhil is Atmospheric Physics from Oxford and has 20 years’ experience in atmospheric and environmental remote sensing research and data management. She represents the UK Earth Observation and environmental data community on various programmes and committees. She is Science Leader of the Climate Change Initiative Open Data Portal and is responsible for the academic component of the UK Collaborative Ground Segment for Sentinel data.

Victoria is also head of EO, ensuring delivery of the NCEO work programme in CEDA.

Jennifer joined CEDA in 2019 and works as a project manager across a number of different projects. Prior to this she was a Technology Consultant at Accenture for over 5 years working with numerous clients across different industries. Jennifer holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry and an MSci (Hons) in Chemistry, both from the University of Bristol. Her PhD research involved use of both the Diamond Synchrotron, Harwell and ESRF in Grenoble, France.

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Steve joined the NEODC in 2003 after completing his PhD at the Open University using remote sensing and field methods to study active Volcanism.  Before this Steve had completed a degree in Earth Science and an MSc in Earth Observation Science at Leicester University.  Steve used his experience in the NEODC looking after such diverse datasets as the ARSF and ATSR and AATSR multimission datasets. As part of CEDA, Steve now looks after the retrieval of Sentinel data and various services associated with this.  Steve continues to look after other EO datasets such as ATSR, and is also a member of the CEDA metadata system team. 

Fran joined CEDA through the graduate scheme in 2019 following a masters degree in Applied Meteorology at Reading University. Francesca also holds a BSc in Environmental Science from Plymouth University. Fran is responsible as a Data Scientist, for providing data management support to researchers, predominantly for projects funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Wendy ensures that CEDA meets its targets to provide data management support for NERC funded projects in the atmospheric and earth observation fields.  She has particular interest in ground-based and airborne observations and is responsible for all of CEDAs aircraft datasets including the FAAM aircraft, NERC-ARF and the European Facility for Airborne Research. She joined CEDA in 2003 following a postdoctoral fellowship studying urban air quality and has a PhD in Atmospheric Physics from Aberystwyth which used sonde and aircraft observations to study tropospheric ozone.

Hayley joined CEDA in 2015 as a helpdesk operator making her the first point of contact between CEDA and the global research community. In addition to this, Hayley also has responsibility for data science tasks such as updating and editing the CEDA data catalogue and cataloguing data about solar plates for the UKSSDC.

Hayley is currently studying towards a BSc(Hons) in Earth Science with Astronomy and Planetary Science at the Open University and holds a Distinction in Meteorology level 3 certificate.

Andrew joined CEDA in 1998 and has been involved in the IT infrastructure that supports CEDA’s work ever since. He currently looks after the various software services that CEDA run and occasionally gets to write a bit of code as well.

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Matt joined CEDA in 2018 after completing a PhD investigating big data analysis in atmospheric science. Matt’s work at CEDA involves developing software solutions to storing and accessing big data on JASMIN.

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Philip is responsible for the development of software and computing services for CEDA providing the technical vision, leadership and oversight of development work.  He is also responsible for the development of cloud computing services for JASMIN. He chairs the UKRI Working Group on cloud computing and is a member of the Executive Committee for Earth System Grid federation, a globally distributed software infrastructure for sharing earth sciences data.  Prior to working with CEDA, he worked on the development of software applications for a variety of space science and earth observation applications. His graduate degree was in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Salford.

Neil joined CEDA in 2016 after working on the climateprediction.net and weather@home projects at the University of Oxford for 12 years, during which he gained a DPhil. in Atmospheric Physics.

At CEDA, Neil is using his experience of large datasets to develop solutions to storing and accessing the very large volume of data held on JASMIN at CEDA, both in user's group workspaces and in the archive. These solutions involve using new storage technology, such as object stores and scale-out filesystems, and novel methods to exploit existing technology such as tape and parallel file systems.

Alison joined CEDA in 2003, having previously worked for 14 years at the Met Office.

Alison has experience of working with a wide range of data types, from high-resolution near real time radar data, to satellite remote sensing data and climate model output. She has also worked on climate model development. Her current role at CEDA is to support scientists throughout the international atmospheric and climate science communities in using data standards to facilitate data exchange and interoperability. Alison participates in a number of training activities such as the CEDA webinar series and the NCAS Introduction to Scientific Computing Course.

Charlotte has extensive experience of the development and application of data models for climate science. Her work has supported model documentation for both the CMIP5 and CMIP6 climate model intercomparison projects.   She is an associate member of the IPCC-Data Task Group and works on the IPCC Data Distribution Centre where the focus of her work is making climate data available to the wider climate science community.

Graham has responsibility for observational data (e.g radar, lidar, surface met) from our atmospheric community, drawing on his skills and knowledge gained since he joined CEDA in 2007 on the back of his atmospheric physics PhD. His PhD used the UK’s MST radar near Aberystwyth to produce a climatology of strong winds in the free troposphere over the British Isles with a focus on Sting Jets - a subject that still captures his interest.

Sam joined the team in 1996 (then known as the British Atmospheric Data Centre) and is now the curation manager for the CEDA Archive. His principal role is to oversee all operational aspects of preserving data and making it accessible. This covers the fundamentals of just keeping the data files secure to managing the complexities of licenses. Before working for CEDA he was a postdoctoral atmospheric Science researcher at Aberystwyth university. Sam is also regularly called upon by wider groups within NERC to assist in the continued improvement of curation practices across all of NERC data centres.

Ruth joined CEDA in October 2015 as a Senior Data Scientist with responsibility for large programme data; such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) data. Ruth also works closely with the Met Office archiving subsets of their Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) data and Hadley Centre climate observation datasets. Ruth also works on developing controlled vocabularies to facilitate data discovery and interoperability.

Ruth has a Masters and PhD from the University of Reading where she worked with the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) and the Met Office on High Resolution Data Assimilation for Numerical Weather Prediction. She has experience of climate modelling from working with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) performing climate model experiments investigating the potential impacts on climate of Arctic sea ice decline.

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Matt is responsible for the delivery of JASMIN as a service to its user community, including CEDA. He liaises with staff in STFC’s Scientific Computing Department responsible for operating JASMIN’s infrastructure components (storage, network, compute) and leads the team tasked with supporting users to gain access to, and exploit JASMIN effectively for their scientific needs.

He started at RAL in 2000, initially helping to establish the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre (NEODC), now part of the CEDA Archive.

He holds a BSc in Geophysics (Geological) from the University of Leicester and a PhD from the University of Durham, where he used global earthquake data to study the structure of the Earth’s mantle beneath Iceland.

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Elle joined the CEDA software development team in 2019 through the graduate scheme after completing a BSc in Physics with study abroad at Durham University.

Richard joined CEDA through the graduate scheme following a degree in Meteorology and Climate Science and develops web interfaces to improve discoverability and searchability of the data holdings at CEDA. He specifies in building and maintaining an Elasticsearch cluster with indices used to provide data to CEDA services.

Ag manages a number of activities and engages with many external groups. Based in Exeter, he has a particular focus on our interactions with the Met Office. He oversees the data pipeline that delivers Petabytes of climate simulations through the Model Intercomparison Projects (such as CMIP5/6) and looks after the UK Climate Projections User Interface which is managed by CEDA and runs on the JASMIN platform. Ag has a keen interest in developing better tools for improving data curation, management and delivery. He also oversees the CEDA training programme.

Poppy’s primary role as Communications Manager is to promote the work of CEDA to users, partner organisations, funders and the general public. This is achieved via a range of external communications including, but not limited to; writing website content, managing social media channels, scheduling events like workshops and webinars, and supporting stakeholder or public engagement events. Poppy also manages user support via the helpdesk. 

She is also responsible, as a Data Scientist, for providing data management support to researchers, predominantly for projects funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Poppy holds a MSc in Science Communication from UWE Bristol and a BSc in Ocean Science from Plymouth University.

William joined CEDA in 2015 after completing a degree in Software Engineering at Aberystwyth University. He utilises his experience with web development and security to improve and maintain CEDA's various web services, as well as the rest of its ever-expanding software infrastructure.

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Ed joined CEDA through the graduate scheme following a degree in Meteorology and Climate Science at Reading. Ed’s role within CEDA is working on the Sentinel datasets as well as other large satellite missions.

Kate joined CEDA through the graduate scheme following a degree in BSc Geography at Coventry University. Kate is responsible as a Data Scientist, for providing data management support to researchers, predominantly for projects funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.