Emerging voices

Building on last year’s success with a new “Emerging Voices” session, we will be showcasing two new speakers this year. Emerging voices provides a platform for newcomers and early career members of our community to share their stories, insights and expertise. This initiative aims to showcase fresh perspectives, encourage early career voices, and foster diversity of thought within our community. By providing this opportunity, we hope to inspire and empower the next generation of leaders in research software engineering.

Meet the speakers

Speaker profiles

Ana Rodrigues Cavalcante 

Ana Cavalcante is a Senior Data Engineer at University College London Hospital. Her work focuses on standardising structured healthcare data into an international common data model (OMOP), enabling multiple NHS sites to combine their heterogenous data. She supports research projects that make secondary use of routinely collected clinical data combined across trusts, with the aim of improving clinical care. 

Ana has a keen interest in improving the validation and verification of data clinical data pipelines. She enjoys working within the RSE space, and especially in healthcare as there is so much opportunity to have a tangible impact in a short amount of time. Ana has discovered the RSE term and Society of RSE within the last year or so, and wasted no time in getting involved in initiatives like the Society’s mentoring scheme. 

Her background in High Energy Physics gave her plenty of experience with coding and working collaboratively. At EPFL and CERN, she developed her coding skills, worked within large research collaborations, supervised students, and volunteered as a science communicator. These experiences have translated well into current role – whether it’s developing and maintaining data pipelines, fostering a collaborative environment through peer mentoring and learning sessions, or adapting her communication to suit different stakeholders.

Piper Fowler-Wright

Piper is a research software engineer at The Rosalind Franklin Institute at Harwell, Oxford, with a strong interest in open source software and computing education for researchers. His journey in research software has taken him from a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews to studying transport in organic materials as a postdoc in a chemistry group at UC San Diego, before joining the Advanced Research Computing team as an RSE at The Franklin earlier this year.

An advocate of open science, Piper has been actively involved with the Carpentries community at St Andrews and co-leads the development of the OQuPy Python package for simulating open quantum systems. His commitment to computing education and sustainable software development motivates his current work supporting researchers across diverse scientific domains.

When not at his desk, Piper enjoys taking on long-distance cycling challenges, having pedalled through tours and events in America and across Europe. He is keen to engage with the RSE community and discover new tools and best practices for building open science projects.