CEDA Apprentice wins two STFC awards

Posted on November 25, 2019 (Last modified on October 19, 2023) • 2 min read • 270 words

Congratulations are in order for CEDA’s current apprentice, Matthew Richards, after he won an award at STFC RAL’s annual Apprentice Awards Evening. The award ceremony is held to ‘recognise the achievements of all of our apprentices working across the breadth of operations.’ Matthew received the Apprentice Peer Support award and was ‘highly commended’ for the Apprentice Outreach Award. 

The peer support award is described as ‘recognising the support of another apprentice who you feel has gone ‘above and beyond’ in providing you with support, advice and guidance’. Matthew was nominated by his peers because of his dry sense of humour, straight talking and academic support. 

Matthew’s outreach commendation was because for the second year in a row, his submission to the RSE Conference was accepted (submissions are peer-reviewed and have quite a high rejection rate). This year he gave a walk-though on the work he did in STFC’s Technology department on Jupyter notebooks. 

Apprentices get the opportunity to experience a variety of STFC work by working on a rotational basis around different departments. Within CEDA, Matthew has been working on a tool to be used by other CEDA staff for metrics gathering of certain services. The metrics are used in a graphical reporting tool which allows tracking of this data over time. This is a much improved tool over the previous version, which required manual calculations. Matthew’s work is therefore essential for reducing staff time spent on this particular task. 

A big well done and thank you to Matthew for all of his hard work! 

If you’d like to know more about the STFC Apprenticeship scheme, take a look here.