Dragonfly grows database and programming expertise

18 July, 2012

Mountain bike tracks in Wellington - credit: tracks.org.nz

The appointment of Richard Mansfield to the Dragonfly team brings some complementary programming and web development expertise to the company. Previously from Catalyst IT, Richard is a specialist in open source software development for the web.

“Coming to Dragonfly seems like a good change and a chance to work with Edward and Finlay on the analytical techniques they have been using for a long time. Working on applied problems will be exciting and I’m keen to get into more statistical analysis”, he says.

“After my PhD I continued with the computing side because that’s what I was most interested in, and have been doing programming for the last 5 years.

“At Victoria, Marcus Frean supervised my PhD and Edward was a co-supervisor. At that time, Edward and Marcus were interested in ‘rock-paper-scissors’ systems where three or more species predate on each other in a loop. Depending on the spatial structure you can end up with extinctions or a stable system. These simulations show that even in simple ecological systems you can get complex behaviour.

Richard is a keen mountain biker who bikes to and from work and lives near some of New Zealand’s best off-road tracks.

“Wellington is awesome for my sport. I bike everywhere but mountain biking is my passion. Someone ran into me in traffic once, and I ended up with a couple of broken bones, but nothing too serious has happened to me so far.”