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.

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Episode credits

Hosts: Vanessa Bismuth and Charlie Walker

Recording and editing: Chris Brock

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