Neil is the founding Director of the Software Sustainability Institute. Graduating with an MPhys in Computational Physics from the University of Edinburgh, he began his career at EPCC, becoming Project Manager there in 2003. During this time he led the Data Access and Integration projects (OGSA-DAI and DAIT), and collaborated in many e-Science projects.
From 2007-2010, Neil was Director of OMII-UK, which provided and supported free, open-source software to the UK e-Research community. During this period, he was also Technical Manager of the JISC-funded NeISS social simulation project and the Project Manager of the JISC-funded ENGAGE initiative to undertake small, directed interventions in the development of software supporting researchers.
His current research is in the use of cloud computing for research, software ecosystems, and digital repositories. He advises several related organisations including the ASEArch CCP, Future Compute, the Water Science Software Institute, the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyber-Infrastructure, and e-Research South. He is the editor of the Journal of Open Research Software, and an advocate for the Software Carpentry initiative to help researchers be more productive by teaching them basic computing skills