Verity Allan: From ancient words to distant worlds

Today we’re joined by Verity Allan, who works as a project manager, developer, and programmer of architecture and software for the Square Kilometre Array, which will be the world's largest radio telescope. A graduate of Cambridge, Oxford, and The Open University, Verity came to Cambridge from a town in the Midlands to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. How did she go from studying ancient languages, to coding, designing security for telescope software systems, and pursuing a PhD in high performance computing for astrophysics? These are just some of the twists and turns we hope to explore in our chat with Verity. Stay with us. Useful Links: Explore | SKAO - Learn more about the two largest telescope arrays in the world Ross Anderson's book on Security Engineering, mentioned by Verity, is available at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html (all three editions plus some videos) Verity wrote two papers on the history of scientific computing: The Cavendish Computors: The women working in scientific computing for Radio Astronomy and Scientific Computing in the Cavendish Laboratory and the pioneering women Computors Learn more about Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics - The University of Manchester and about our Astrophysics work in Cambridge. Share and join the conversation Help us get better by taking our quick survey. Your feedback will help us understand how we can improve in the future. Thank you! If you like this episode don’t forget to rate it and leave a review on your favourite podcast app. It really helps others to find us. Any comment about the podcast or question you would like to ask our physicists, email us at podcast@phy.cam.ac.uk or join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #PeopleDoingPhysics. Episode credits Hosts: Vanessa Bismuth and Charlie Walker Recording and editing: Chris Brock This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy