The Team

Marianne Brown

Project Manager

Marianne has worked in the IT industry since 1994 in a variety of roles from research programmer, university lecturer, software engineer and systems analyst and designer. She has been employed at the eResearch Centre at James Cook University since 2009, working on various web application projects and has been involved in several ANDS/QCIF funded projects:

• EIF046 - Tropical Data Hub Portal - created a Plone product to add a simple metadata repository to a Plone site.
  The code and documentation is available from the github site.
• SC23 - Tropical Data Hub Collection Discovery and Description - this project's aim was to use the system developed in EIF046 to enter metadata records for JCU research data and have these harvested by ANDS for publication on Research Data Australia. By the end of the project, 68 collection records had been collected and published.

Currently, Marianne is managing a number of ANDS funded projects.

Daniel Baird

Software Engineer and Tech Lead

Daniel has bachelor degrees in Psychology and Computer Science, and has worked in software and technology for fifteen years. His experience ranges though the retail, higher education and corporate sectors. Most recently Daniel served as the Chief Technology Officer for Code Valley, organising and directing foundational research into the nature of how sofware is constructed.

Daniel has developed commercially deployed software in Borland Delphi, Java Swing, C++Builder, PHP, Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports, ColdFusion, Ruby, and web technologies. He has been a significant contributor to the TiddlyWiki community and with Simon Baird, founded the wiki hosting site tiddlyspot.com.

Robert Pyke

Software Engineer

Robert is a developer for the Centre For Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change and a student at JCU. He is studying Computer Systems Engineering and Information Technology. In his previous role as Senior Software Engineer at Code Valley, he was responsible for researching, designing and implementing novel company technologies.

Robert is an active member of the developer community, and acts as the NQLD ACS Chapter student representative.

Robert has participated in a variety of coding competitions. His team placed first in Australia in 2009's IEEEXtreme Programming Competition.

Technologies familiar with:

• Ruby, Java, HTML, CSS, JSON/XML/YAML, Javascript
• Google App Engine, Google APIs, AWS, NodeJS, Heroku, Netbeans Module Development, Ruby On Rails, PHP, Lex/Yacc/JavaCC
• Vim, Netbeans
• Git, Subversion

Tom Dalling

Software Engineer

Tom graduated from JCU with a B.IT/B.Bus double degree in 2009. He was employed as a website developer during 2007, and has been doing web development on a freelance basis since then. After graduating he started working as an OSX software developer.

In his spare time, he enjoys game development in OpenGL and C++, playing DotA and Minecraft, and cappuccinos.

Web techologies familiar with:

• Server-side:
  • Languages: Most familiar with PHP, but have used Ruby and Python a little bit (and I'm happy to use them). Fine with C/C++ and bash, if needed.
  • Software: Apache, MySQL, SQLite.
  • OS: Comfortable on linux and OSX.
• Client-side:
  • The usual HTML, CSS, JavaScript (with and without jQuery), and AJAX with JSON or XML.
  • Some experience with Google's Closure Tools
• Development:
  • Fluent in Git, Vim, and unix shells
  • Gerrit for code review

Lauren Hodgson

Domain Expert

Lauren Hodgson completed a Bachelor of Science (Zoology) in 2006 at James Cook University and immediately began work as a research assistant on a project that determined the impacts of weed management on reptiles and amphibians. Since 2009, she has worked both for the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change (CTBCC) and the NCCARF Terrestrial Biodiversity Adaptation Research Network.

Through this work, she has taken an interest in modeling our capacity to adapt to climate change. Presently, she is involved with the modeling of current and future impacts and adaptation opportunities for Australian crops; the pond-based aquaculture industry; and freshwater and terrestrial refugia for biodiversity. She has also recently become involved in projects aimed at presenting research outputs to the public via online interfaces.

Lauren liaises between the researchers and developers.