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Crimping up a route! Credit: Tim Yorath, Aug 2004


Chilling! Credit: Rose Yates, Jan 2004

Resume

Chris graduated from the Department of Computation in the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He worked as a COBOL programmer in London before forsaking the bright lights and razzamatazz of the City for a research role in the Software Engineering Tools Group based in his ala mater. He worked as a part-time teaching assistant while pursuing his Masters degree.

He was awarded an MSc. for his work on a distributed implementation of Pascal-Plus and continued his involvement with the Software Engineering Tools Group as a Research Assistant. He was part of the team that built an in-house heterogeneous host and network system using very early Local Area Network technologies; that was actively used as research vehicle as well as providing a standard computing service.

He was later employed by the Department of Computation as a Computer Officer in order to exploit his research efforts. This resulted in the production of a bespoke Software Engineering Teaching and Development Environment that was used to support undergraduate courses, project work as well as postgraduate activities.

Since then he has moved from a teaching to a research-oriented support role, providing courseware, training, programming and consultancy in the use of very specialist computer systems like the Parsys Transputer sn9500 32 node multi-processor.

In 2000, he moved from Computation to the Department of Physics in order to broaden his horizons. Five years later, he took on the role as the School Information Systems and Electronic Services Manager in the School of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, when the two departments from UMIST and the Victoria University of Manchester merged to form a single school of Physics. Under his guidance, his small team proceeded to rationalise, modernise and streamline the IT and its support infrastructure within the new School by designing clearly defined IT standards and procedures, and a flexible infrastructure for managing and supporting the School's complex networking, diverse IT and electronic requirements. He was also part of the liaison team that ensured continuity of services and minimal disruptions to teaching and research during a complex three year building refurbishment programme which was designed to update the aging Schuster Laboratory.

Since then, he has retired and is now devoting his time to his personal research and studies, photography, travel and of course, his climbing.

Research Interests

Chris has an interest in novel computing architectures; including massively parallel computing, declarative and data flow paradigms, type systems and alternative memory models, like persistence and state-managed memory. He is also interested in the formal aspects of computer science and intelligent state-driven user-interfaces. His former role in the School of Physics and Astronomy gave him unlimited scope to indulge in his Geekiness and love for Boys Toys!


Pitch black giggles! Credit: Phil West, Jun 2005

Other Interests

He is a passionate climber and adventure traveller. You can follow some of his adventures or read about his equipment ideas and online guide books here. He also has a fondness for picking up languages and after acquiring a splattering of Polish, Czech and Slovak, he is now trying to learn Spanish.

Contact

You can email Chris by first removing the Walnut.


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Last Updated: 9 February 2009