Dr Matt Johns

Matt Johns is a Research Software Engineer in the Research Software and Analytics group at the University of Exeter. His work tends to sit where a research method meets the people who need to use it: taking research that lives in code, in papers, or in an expert's head, and turning it into software that others can see, trust, and actually use. He is an approachable and pragmatic collaborator who enjoys joining the dots between ideas, methods, and the real world, and making complicated things clear.

The domains have shifted across his career while that focus has stayed the same. His early research applied interactive optimisation and scientific visualisation to water distribution and wastewater systems, including decision-support tools used in international projects, and his doctoral work on combining human expertise with evolutionary algorithms set the through-line he has followed since: technology that supports expert judgement rather than replacing it. As an Industrial Research Fellow he worked directly with external organisations and SMEs, translating their data-science problems into practical, deployable solutions.

More recently his focus has moved into health and clinical research, developing software that brings established risk models to researchers and clinicians, supports neurodevelopmental analysis, and helps clinical teams make sense of complex data. This work is built with the engineering discipline that clinical software demands, and with a clear sense of where formal medical-device standards and specialist expertise belong.