News Story

Tiff’s Summer Spotlight: Working in the Software and Innovation Engineering Service team

Kiran Parmar, Tuesday 14 Sep 2021

What can you tell us about your role?

I work on all kinds of projects with the researchers here at the OU; this means I can be working on project spec and design, frontend and backend web development, electronics and other physical computing projects – whatever development is needed.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently working on some Arduino-based electronics and e-textile research and learning about AR technologies.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

The part of my job I enjoy the most is creating new things, with learning new technologies a close and very related second.

What things have you made recently?

The most recent thing I made was a user interface and architecture for deploying an artificial tissue growth simulator made by one of our researchers, Dr Jim Hague. He developed CONDOR – a predictive biophysical method for modelling cell self-organisation in artificial tissues for improved design of moulds and scaffolds. However, CONDOR ran on the command line with programmatically generated moulds, and he wanted to be able to deploy it to end-users. I designed and implemented a cloud-based product that allows users to upload 2D drawings as mould designs and spins up Amazon AWS servers to run the models.

This creates a sustainable model that’s easier to update and doesn’t require a huge upfront investment on the part of the software users (as previous scientific modelling software tended to). It provides a framework that can be used to distribute and run similar physics models, as the modelling code itself is independent of the distribution framework.

We’re now seeking partners and early adopters to beta test. Plans for the development of CONDOR involve simulating complex 3D scaffolds, co-cultures and vascularisation to model more complex tissues such as organoids. More information on the physics model can be found at Hague et al. (2020) Phys. Rev. Research 2.