Meet the Research IT team

Steven is helping to shape the University of Exeter’s Digital Research Infrastructure, bringing together advanced computing, research data, cloud, secure research, and the expert support needed to enable research. He is passionate about creating supportive environments where people, teams, and services can thrive, helping researchers to do more, work more effectively, and pursue increasingly ambitious research.

His work focuses on building new teams and ways of working, improving how services are designed and delivered, and supporting a more joined up, sustainable, and researcher focused approach. He is particularly interested in using data informed insight to guide priorities and service improvement, and in ensuring research infrastructure is both environmentally and financially sustainable.

Alongside his role at Exeter, Steven contributes to the wider research computing community through the HPC-SIG, supporting collaboration, knowledge sharing, and community development across the sector.

Martyn has worked at the university for a number of years, initially supporting the Astrophysics group before becoming the Research IT Manager. He has a broad range of skills across the compute and data landscape being able to support the varied research at the University. 

Martin leads the interface between researchers and Research IT Services, ensuring that new opportunities, emerging technologies, and evolving research needs are translated into practical, sustainable, and scalable services that help researchers achieve their goals.

He is responsible for managing the demand into Research IT, including research computing, data platforms, and the digital tools that enable collaboration and innovation. Martin is passionate about building strong partnerships, identifying opportunities for improvement, and ensuring Research IT services continue to evolve to meet the changing needs of the research community while delivering long-term value.

James joined the University of Exeter as Digital Research Compute Lead following a long career in a variety of technical roles in environmental science and industry. His experience is rooted in software operating at all levels of capabilities, from microcontrollers through to HPC and cloud, with a focus on systems integration and distributed architectures. James' passion is serving the research community with the platforms and services they need to undertake impactful and innovative research for the benefit of society, whilst advocating for sustainable and responsible use of digital infrastructure.

His technical background most recently focused on polar science, driving development of digital infrastructure in Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey, as well as forming their research software engineering focused Digital Innovation Team. He collaborated on numerous AI, federated infrastructure, Digital Twin and numerical modelling projects. He is a Software Sustainability Institute Fellow (2022), Carpentries instructor and general advocate of great engineering leading effective service delivery.

Chris has over a decade of experience at GigaScience Press, where he served as Director of GigaDB, leading data curation, metadata standards, and platform development for one of the world’s most recognised open-data publishers. He brings deep expertise in the research data lifecycle, FAIR principles, metadata schema design (including DataCite and schema.org), and community engagement through international bodies such as the Genomic Standards Consortium, where he has served as a board member.