Dr. Abhishek Dasgupta

Senior Research Software Engineer

Abhishek has a DPhil in Computer Science from the University of Oxford, where he worked on extending a theory of generic inference, before moving to a postdoctoral position in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford, where he worked on projects such as political polarization in social media and developing a measure of significance for legislation. He joined the OxRSE group in 2019 when he realised that he liked writing code more than writing research articles.

As an RSE, Abhishek has worked on interesting research projects in the university and encourages the adoption of best practices such as unit testing and reproducibility. Currently, he is part of the engineering team at Global.health, a multi-disciplinary collaborative project that is developing a repository and visualization platform enabling open access to real-time epidemiological anonymized line-list data. Previously, he has contributed to LanguageScreen, a platform that assesses language skills in primary school children and informs intervention studies, and the ASMC project. As part of Global.health, he has collaborated with the World Health Organisation in schema standardisation, led the development of clinical data pipelines as part of the ISARIC consortium and multimodal climate and epidemiological data integration efforts in the DART project to forecast dengue incidence in Vietnam.

Abhishek's expertise lies in data integration pipelines and backend web development and he is interested in exploring low-level languages such as C++ and Rust for improving performance in computationally expensive data processing. He was selected as a Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Fellow and a Reproducible Research Oxford Fellow in 2021. Beyond work projects, he has an avid interest in contributing to open-source software, and is a contributor to the Climate Aware Task Scheduler, and the Carpentries Offline project, a Raspberry Pi (or similar small board computer) based system for disseminating Carpentries teaching material in low-resource or offline settings. Both these projects secured partial funding from SSI for further development. Previously he has contributed to package maintenance in Debian and Arch Linux and infrastructure and package quality tooling in Arch Linux.