Symplectic people
Daniel Hook - Managing Director
Daniel's main responsibilities within Symplectic are for product development strategy, sales and marketing, as well as external relationship management.
This role sees him travelling within the UK and internationally, talking to academics, research managers, librarians, funding councils, publishers and data providers. This gives him a detailed awareness of systems requirements right across the higher education sector at both a strategic and a technical level.
Before founding Symplectic, Daniel worked in professional programming in telecommunications, writing software for a call routing/cost optimisation product, which now runs in a number of telecoms providers worldwide. He has written in C++, C#, VB.NET, VB 6 and SQL, and has been involved with structural database development for a Content Management System for Imperial College London.
For Symplectic, Daniel also specialises in:
- Implementation strategies - at both a technical and personnel level
- Systems integration - interfaces between disparate systems
- Information flows within complex environments
- Organisational modelling - analysis of organisational structuring
- Optimising navigational structure in websites
In addition to Daniel's programming and corporate experience he continues to play an active role in theoretical physics research. His interests include quantum statistical mechanics, the application of geometric tools to quantum theory, PT-Symmetric quantum theory, complexification of classical mechanical systems, information geometry and and social network theory.
Academic homepage at Imperial College
John Fearns - Director
John's computing interests began with games programming for the BBC microcomputer in the early eighties, and later the development of general relativistic ray-tracing software on the Acorn Archimedes and PC, before joining the programming world professionally in 2002.
He specialises in asynchronous programming and the architecture of distributed systems, and this has underpinned much of the Publications System's ease of integration within organisations, such as with web sites, authentication systems and Institutional Repositories.
John's efforts now concentrate on:
- Core Publications product development with an emphasis on interoperability
- The company's reusable technologies
- Maintenance and development of the Symplectic Invigilator student management system
Marko Ivin - Director
Marko heads the technical development of Symplectic's Publications Management System. He works with all the other developers on the project to ensure that the system maintains consistency of technical implementation across the wide range of functions it carries out.
Prior to his involvement in Symplectic, he studied at Imperial College London in the Theoretical Physics group under Tim Evans. His PhD concentrated on diagrammatic and computational/numerical approaches to quantum field theory, which lead him to develop considerable skills in C++ and high precision computing algorithms.
Marko has lead a number of projects at Symplectic including the ongoing maintenance of the Symplectic Content Management System, programming an innovative multi-faceted News and Events management system, creating management databases for HR and financial processes, and developing software for the NHS.
Marko currently specialises in SQL and .NET Framework as these are the core of Symplectic's software. However, he has considerable understanding of a wider range of programming languages and technologies.
For Symplectic, Marko also specialises in:
- Systems implementation
- Systems integration
- Research into new technologies
- Development methodologies
Marko continues to apply his research skills, usually to the most recent programming technology that he's found to investigate on the web.
Philip Parkin - Director
Philip has been involved with programming, mainly in an academic context, since the early nineties; from simulating the paths of photons orbiting black holes through
to modelling phase transitions in Bose-Einstein condensates as part of his PhD.
For Symplectic, Philip has focused on:
- Creating a file management system for the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College
- A complete ASP.NET application tracking student placements and invoices for the Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College
- Developing innovative user-friendly graphical user interfaces for our core products
Martyn Whitwell - Analyst Developer
Martyn has had a long relationship with Symplectic but has recently joined the staff with a remit focussing on the extension and development of the Symplectic Content Management System. He specialises in analysing, enhancing and re-factoring existing systems, and in prototyping novel systems and services.
Deep in Martyn’s past he coded the first versions of the Content Management System for the Faculty of Medicine and worked on a precursor to the Publications Management System, as well writing the database middleware for a past incarnation of Imperial’s main website.
Commercially, Martyn has worked for small start-ups, corporates and global B2B services. He designed and built software to synchronise a complex globally-distributed database, and also created a Customer Relationship Management system. Most recently he has been involved creating an education-focused start-up. Martyn also runs a successful software company specialising in Ruby on Rails and .NET consultancy.
Despite originally studying to be a physicist, Martyn’s main interest is in a theory of cognition and the related fields of philosophy, neuroinformatics and computer science.
Richard Jones - Head of Repository Systems
Richard is responsible for the Publications System's integration with digital repository systems, which have been his long-term interest.
Richard has built and deployed repository systems for three large universities: the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bergen, and Imperial College London. He is an experienced software architect, is a core developer of the DSpace platform, and plays an active role in open standards development for repository and information systems such as the SWORD deposit protocol and the Open Archives Initiative Object Re-use and Exchange standard for complex web-objects. He has written numerous academic articles on repository development and Open Access, as well as a book concentrating explicitly on Institutional Repositories.
Before joining Symplectic, Richard worked for Hewlett-Packard's research laboratory, Imperial College, and the universities of Bergen and Edinburgh. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he holds a degree in Astrophysics. His specialities are in software architecture and information representation and management. He has worked with Symplectic as a client in the past, so has particular experience of their user's needs.
Tim Evans - Head of Research
Tim Evans is a senior lecturer in theoretical physics at Imperial College London. Tim has published more than 50 papers covering research topics from thermal field and quantum theory to complex network theory and cultural transmission in the ancient Aegean.
Tim works closely with Symplectic to enhance the usability of our products from the perspective of an academic researcher. He also works with the team on the development of statistical, bibliometric and community analysis tools within Symplectic Publications, advising not only on general direction, but also on the specifics of particular indicators and metrics.
Academic homepage at Imperial College
Sian Berry - User and Client Support Manager
Sian's background is in communications, marketing and technical writing. She began her career as a medical copywriter, developing promotions and interactive sales tools for large pharmaceutical companies, and now also works as an author and environmental campaigner.
Before joining Symplectic, she worked for Imperial College London, and was closely involved in the development of new functionality for both Symplectic Publications and the Symplectic CMS.
Sian helps put a client and user perspective at the heart of Symplectic's work, ensuring the company's software tools are user-friendly and engaging, as well as writing user guides and promotional materials for our products.
