I am a materials scientist on the staff of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. I recently became leader of the Mechanical Performance Group which encompasses a lot of experimental capabilities with burgeoning data acquisition and analysis needs. Many of my colleagues do a lot of coding, but don’t think of themselves as programmers and don’t engage in many of the practices that would make their lives easier. I’d like to be a more effective evangelist of Software Carpentry concepts.
I have spent most of my career at NIST modeling phase transformations and the boundaries between different phases of matter. I code primarily in Python and am one of the co-developers of the FiPy partial differential equation solver. A couple of times a year, I teach thermodynamics, phase transformations, and the use of FiPy to understand these processes to graduate students, post-docs, and faculty who are interested in incorporating computational materials science into their research and curricula. I think these courses have gone OK (and I keep getting invited back), but even before seeing the keynotes at SciPy ‘14 (including Greg’s) I’ve felt that I was not being nearly as effective as I’d like to be.