Team Bios

Marco Fahmi

Project Manager

Marco sold his first piece of software in 1991; a Microsoft Excel macro that was to be used in a masters research project.

His promising career as a software developer came to an end a few months before the Dotcom crash when he decided to leave the dungeon and see the world.

Marco has been an academic Ronin since 2000. He is now with the eResearch team at the Institute for Future Environments at QUT. In his spare time, he plays Capoeira, writes a PhD dissertation, spends time with his family and contemplates the ideal work-life balance.

Vaughan Hobbs

Software Developer and Tech Lead

Vaughan is an IT Generalist with exposure to all aspects of the software development lifecycle, from conception, client liaison, envisioning, planning, development, testing and after sales support.

He is an Enterprise Java developer with over ten years experience, specialising in enterprise integrations and data interchange in both commercial and government sectors.  Vaughan also has a background in repository development in both the research and education sectors, including metadata catalogues, search engine functionality and online social applications.

He has extensive experience in using and contributing to open source projects, is experienced in boot-strapping development teams with modern development processes and best practices, and hands on project management at dev-lead level.

Siobhann McCafferty

Research Data Coordinator

Siobhann comes to the Institute of Future Environments, QUT with a wealth of education and experience.  She has Undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Religious Studies, a Master of Arts in Religious Studies and is currently studying towards her Masters in Information Management.  She adds to that, 14 years of experience of working in libraries in Scotland, New Zealand and Australia.

Siobhann has interests in:

• Data security and access
• Encouraging discovery and reuse of data resources
• User education
• Metadata standardization
• Promoting quality data storage as an academic resource

When not at her desk she prefers to stand on her head.

 

 

Alvin Sebastian

Software Engineer

Alvin completed a PhD in Computer Science in 2011 at QUT and has been working with the eResearch Team at QUT’s Institute for Future Environments as a developer on various projects including research data repository portals and other support tools for environmental research. Alvin’s previous experience in the IT industry includes developing content management systems, web portals, mobile messaging platforms, and mobile applications. He is familiar with numerous technologies:

• Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, Python
• HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, XSLT
• SQL-based and NoSQL databases, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss
• Netbeans, Eclipse, Subversion, Mercurial

Jodie Vaughan

Research Data Librarian

Jodie comes to us from working first in the trenches (literally) with an honours degree in Archaeology from James Cook University. She has also dabbled in the study of GIS and Remote Sensing and a little Ancient History at UQ.
More recently Jodie ended up in a music library working for Griffith University at the Queensland Conservatorium.

Now she is using her qualifications in Library and Information Science in the exciting eResearch world at the Institute of Future Environments, QUT.

Siddeswara Guru

External Advisor

Guru works for TERN and ACEAS as their Data Integration and Synthesis Coordinator.  He comes from a Computer Science background.  But, most of his time in the last 10 years has been spent in research and development in the area of networking protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, Sensor data management, Sensor data integration and synthesis, and writing technical peer-reviewed papers on these areas.

Guru brings to the team experience in scientific workflow and developing actors and workflow in Kepler environment.