Alex Southgate PhD

Dr Alex Southgate, Senior Bioinformatics Engineer at BioXcelerate AI, holds a PhD in bioinformatics from Cardiff University, and has made a wide range of contributions in research and engineering.

Alex has developed cloud platforms in microbial bioinformatics, software and statistical modelling approaches in genomics for public health, and maintained software and infrastructure in mathematical biology and gravitational wave physics. For advocating for sustainable software engineering in research, Alex was awarded a fellowship by the Software Sustainability Institute. Alex is currently interested in software engineering challenges, algorithms, and building and modelling computational systems. Alex is keen to play a role in supporting and empowering scientists and researchers in the translation of novel innovations into scalable and robust systems.

At BioXcelerate, Alex makes use of expertise in Software Engineering, DevOps, and computational system design, as well as employing knowledge of bioscience to better understand the software beyond its technical implementation. Alex leverages expertise in many different programming languages, as well as solid understanding of Linux & cloud systems. Alex is enthusiastic about establishing robust engineering processes to empower sustainable and efficient development. Before joining BioXcelerate, Alex worked as a member of LIGO, a scientific organisation dedicated to the observation of gravitational waves from the merger of black holes & other astrophysical events. As a research software engineer, Alex supported computational systems required to process and manage data derived from observations, contributed to analysis libraries, and maintained systems required for management of large-scale highly distributed compute resources.