Before taking up the Software Engineering lectureship, I was a SICSA Advanced Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science and before this, I was a research associate at the National Centre for e-Social Science (now the Manchester e-Research Centre) at the University of Manchester. Before joining Manchester, I was a research associate in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where I also did my PhD.

My main research interests are the organisational use of ICTs and, in particular, how technologies and practices change as people grapple with their day-to-day work, trying to meaningfully relate the various elements of their working world to each other. There has traditionally been a separation of "design" and "use" of ICTs which manifests itself in many ways, e.g. in the structural organisation of ICT development and the dominant role that "expert" expertise plays in the process. I believe that this current conceptualisation of ICT development and the roles of various actors is unhelpful and the root cause of many problems in ICT development.

I am particularly interested in advanced ICT infrastructures such as clouds and grids. These technologies are used by researchers in many disciplines to tackle research problems that would be difficult to address without such infrastructures because of their need for processing power, their need to integrate data from different sources or their need to bring collaborating partners from different institutions and disciplinary backgrounds together. The use of such advanced ICTs in research is called e-Research (or e-Science) and I have edited a book entitled Research In a Connected World that describes the principles and applications of e-Research.

The UK e-Science programme and similar investments in other countries have led to the development of a rich set of e-Research technologies and tools. In my opinion, we are now at a point where the focus needs to be on consolidation and embedding the best of these tools in actual production working practices. In order to do this, we need to work out the core principles of e-Research and start teaching them to future generations of researchers along with convincing examples of use of the current set of tools that are available.

In recent years, researchers have started to utilise Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud infrastructures such as Amazon's EC2 as well as private cloud infrastructures based on Eucalyptus or OpenStack. Using these infrastructures can be very easy if all that is required is a virtual server but using them to meet more demanding requirements is non-trivial. To run a series of experiments in the cloud, to manage input and output data, to monitor progress and resource usage and to facilitate collaboration between researchers, the raw resources provided by a cloud need to be configured and turned into a virtual research infrastructure. The ELVIRA project is aiming to provide support for this through providing an 'elastic wrapper' that enables the rapid construction of virtual private research infrastructures for research applications.

Grids and clouds also have applications in industry. What I am particularly interested in is how grids can help organise work across organisational boundaries and how clouds can enable scalable inter-organisational infrastructures. The challenges of implementing effective inter-organisational systems are likely to be ones relating to organisational structures and working practices as much as technical issues. At the moment I am focusing on e-Research but am quite keen to develop industrial case studies as well.

While the social order in ICT work is my main professional focus, I'm interested in the phenomenon of social order in general.