Rachael Ainsworth

I am the Research Software Community Manager for the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and based in the eScience Lab within the Department of Computer Science.

I am a passionate Open Science/Research advocate and work to promote openness, reproducibility, inclusion and wellbeing in research. I am a SSI Fellow 2019, Mozilla Open Leader (Round 4 Project Lead, Round 5 Mentor and Cohort Host), FOSTER Open Science Trainer, Turing Way team member, Tech Future Female Leader and Organiser of the Manchester women in data meetup group HER+Data MCR. If you are interested in collaborating on Open Science/Research activities or with HER+Data MCR, please get in touch!

I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Long Baseline Radio Interferometry at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics (JBCA) here at the University of Manchester, and before that I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in Ireland where I investigated the radio emission properties of outflows from young, Sun-like stars at very long wavelengths, specifically with LOFAR. Our team was the first to successfully detect a young stellar object (YSO) with LOFAR, extending the spectral energy distribution for a T Tauri star to 2 metres (150 MHz) and constraining physical properties associated with its plasma outflows. I was the first to successfully investigate YSOs at metre wavelengths using the GMRT during my Ph.D., which I conducted at DIAS under the supervision of Prof. Tom Ray (DIAS) and Prof. Anna Scaife (University of Manchester).

I obtained my B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where I contributed to projects relating to the explosion mechanism of Type Ia Supernovae using the supercomputing facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I also interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2008 as part of the NASA Undergraduate Student Research Program.