I am a software engineer specialising in the development of software for geoscientific applications. At the BGS I develop software and IT systems to support the monitoring and modelling of the Earth’s magnetic field. My software development career has spanned a range of geoscience, including operational weather forecasting systems, flood modelling on high-performance computers, and data processing systems for magnetic observatories. At BGS I have also taught and designed programming courses for staff including Python and software version control.
Declan Valters’s biography
- 2025 to present: Geomagnetism IT specialist, British Geological Survey
- 2024: Applications Consultant, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
- 2019 to 2024: Geoscience Software Developer, Informatics, British Geological Survey
- 2017: Scientific Software Engineer, Met Office
- 2017 to 2019: Research Software Engineer, Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
- 2013 to 2017: PhD Parallelisation of a numerical model for simulations of flash flooding, University of Manchester
- 2009 to 2013: MEarthSci Geology, University of Edinburgh
Research interest
- Best practices in Software Engineering – Transferring knowledge in programming skills to geoscientists
ORCID: 0000-0002-4562-3944
Chapters
- Valters, D A. 2016. Modelling Geomorphic Systems: Landscape Evolution. In: Cook, S J, Clarke, L E, and Nield, J M. (Eds.) Geomorphological Techniques (Online Edition). British Society for Geomorphology; London, UK. ISSN: 2047–0371.
- Python
- Fortran
- C++
- C programming language
- HPC (High-performance computing) and Parallelisation
- Certified Software Carpentries Instructor
- Unix systems
- Software Containerisation
- Member of the British Computing Society
- Member of the Society of Research Software Engineering