I’m currently in the final stages of a PhD in the physics department at King’s College London in the UK. For the last 4 years I have been primarily interested in taking pictures of single fluorescent molecules embedded in various media and feeding them to a pattern recognition program can tell me what direction they are pointing in. In the process, I ended up simulating a decent chunk of my hardware in MATLAB to answer some more fundamental questions about how well the technique I’m using works.
Prior to that I was awarded a primarily computational master in physics for performing electrodynamic simulations on silver nanostructures and before that I worked briefly as a researcher for a government lab teaching a cut down version of software carpentry among (many) other duties.
I’m basically a physicist with a reasonable programming background and a fondness for writing code that helps researchers solve their problems.