dave gittins

I worked on some exciting projects, mainly for the space and defence industries. End-to-end involvement from business planning and winning new contracts, management and implementation, through to delivery. Also line manager for three staff. Highlights included helping to design control algorithms for satellites such as GIOVE-A and the Globalstar constallation, and doing analysis of the atmospheric entry and parachute descent of the proposed ExoMars lander mission to Mars.

I was part of QTG, a low-latency algorithmic trading group within Liquid Capital. I worked on quant/trader analysis systems and simulation frameworks, production trading C++ code, data and deployment management, monitoring of live trading, and anything else that needed doing.

Software development in C++, Java, Python and anything else required; working with traders to implement improvements and tools. I am really enjoying working with some very smart people in an awesome office which coincidentally has a free bar.

My thesis involved numerical simulation of interstellar gas clouds in which new stars form. Intensive computation work was carried out based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics technique, using code primarily written in Fortran. I revealed fundamental problems with some existing models of star formation and opened several new avenues of research. Later I worked on the spiral-arm structure of galaxies and proposed a new method of measuring their rotation speed. My research proposals were selected for substantial time allocations at a supercomputing facility in Leicester (using a SGI Origin 3000 machine). This required modifications to the code for efficient parallel computing performance. I also wrote code to produce a range of custom animations to visualise my simulation results. Activities and Societies: President of Emmanuel MCR (college graduate student society)