Tamora James

Profile

I began my career in web and software development, working for over a decade in both freelance and permanent roles, before returning to academia to complete an MRes in population ecology and a PhD in conservation demography. While studying for my PhD I became interested in how I could use my background in software development to help other researchers to improve their research software outputs by teaching them about commonly used tools and practices such as version control. I have led workshop sessions on version control and reproducible research at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting and at the University of Oxford. I contributed to the BES publication ‘A Guide to Reproducible Code in Ecology and Evolution’ and I have been a co-organiser of Sheffield R Users Group since 2017.

I joined the Centre for Environmental Modelling and Computation (CEMAC) as a Software Development Scientist in July 2020. My role is primarily in support of the Global Challenges Research Fund African Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques (GCRF African SWIFT) project. Highlights include providing near-real time weather data (nowcasting) and automated synoptic plotting for operational forecasting.

Qualifications

  • PhD Conservation Demography, University of Sheffield
  • MRes Ecology and Environment, University of Sheffield
  • MSc Mathematical Modelling and Scientific Computing, University of Oxford
  • BSc (Hons) Mathematics, University of Sussex

Student education

Assisting with undergraduate and postgraduate computational training.