Elliott Wise, PhD: Resume

Email: ell.wise@gmail.com
GitHub: github.com/ellwise
Website: wiseideas.au

Summary

Applied scientist and research engineer with a PhD in numerical analysis and a decade of experience deploying simulation and data systems within industrial engineering contexts. Published peer-reviewed research, contributed to widely-used open-source scientific software, delivered simulation and digital twin tools for energy and infrastructure clients, and productionised LLM-based tooling for enterprise clients in regulated industries. Experienced leading technical teams and translating research into production systems.

Skills/Tools

Scientific computing and simulation

• Physics solvers and simulation tools: COMSOL (FEA), NAMD, LAMMPS (molecular dynamics)
• HPC and scientific software: Large-scale parallel computation on distributed HPC clusters; research-to-production scientific software development
• Applied mathematics: Fourier-collocation/spectral methods, numerical methods for PDEs, discrete event simulation, linear programming
• Physics domains: Acoustic wave propagation, structural mechanics, metamaterials, molecular dynamics

Machine learning and AI

• Libraries: PyTorch, scikit-learn, Pandas, Plotly/Dash, Kedro, React, Flask
• Modern ML: Physics-informed ML for image processing algorithms (PyTorch), LLM-based classification, OpenAI agent development
• Classical ML: Classification (Random Forests, LightGBM, Naive Bayes, Causal Bayesian Networks), clustering (DBSCAN)

Data and software engineering

• Cloud, warehousing, orchestration: AWS, GCP, Azure, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, Dataform
• Languages: Python, SQL, Julia, MATLAB, JavaScript, R
• Knowledge graphs: OWL 2 ecosystem familiarity; building developer tooling for ontology authoring
• Version control, issue tracking: Git, GitHub/GitLab

Education

PhD	Numerical Analysis	University College London	2018
BEng (Hons)	Mechatronics	Australian National University	2012
BSc	Mathematics	Australian National University	2012

• Educational focus: Scientific and industrial modelling techniques, high-performance computing, acoustics.
• Research focus: Fourier-collocation/spectral methods for acoustic wave equations; computational efficiency of large-scale PDE solvers on HPC infrastructure; research-to-production scientific software development.
• Contributed to k-Wave, an open-source MATLAB toolbox for medical ultrasound simulation with over 10,000 registered users and 700+ citations. Authored 7 journal papers and 2 conference papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Computational Physics, Communications in Computational Physics, and IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium.
• Dean’s Prize (£88k scholarship), Faculty of Engineering, University College London.
• Summer Research Scholarship (AU$4k), Mathematical Sciences Institute, Australian National University.

Experience

Senior Advisor | Gutteridge, Haskins & Davey (GHD) | 2021–Present

• Applied scientist and software engineer within the Data & AI business group, serving clients who manage large-scale infrastructure across energy, rail, telecommunications, and government.
• Regional lead for techno-economic modelling in EMEA, technical lead within the business group, and project leader on client-facing work.
• Engineering simulation, digital twin, and optimisation work includes:
  • Simulating and optimising a green hydrogen facility to support investment decisions.
  • Simulating post-Brexit border flows for goods and people through UK ports to support engineering and investment decisions, earning a nomination for an award within the client organisation.
  • Creating a field-level farm model covering the whole UK to simulate financial and carbon impacts of environmental incentive payments; still actively used after multiple years.
  • Reviewing the role of digital twins within a major UK rail operator’s data and digital strategy.
• Language modelling and semantic engineering work includes:
  • Designing and productionising LLM-based free-text classification for telecommunications billing data, underpinning multi-million-pound monthly charges.
  • Building an ontology authoring tooling for knowledge graph design workflows, including an LLM-based interface for querying and editing ontologies.
• Data engineering work includes:
  • Building and maintaining production data pipelines across GCP/BigQuery, dbt, and Dataform for multi-sector clients, with rigorous automated data quality assurance via dbt and Dataform assertions.
  • Developing web services and Airflow pipelines to support grid flexibility and open data publication for a large electricity transmission operator.

Senior Consultant | Amey Strategic Consulting | 2019–2021

• Data scientist and software engineer within the Data Science & Analytics team.
• Clients owned and managed large-scale public infrastructure.
• Implemented regulatory policy within Ofgem to assess network investment plans against asset health and risk profiles.
• Developed web apps to manage operations, designed and assured regulatory policy for risk management across large asset bases, analysed data using classical statistics and machine learning, and simulated operational asset systems for commercial analysis.
• Management consulting included business analysis and leading stakeholder workshops.

Research Associate | Imperial College London | 2018–2019

• Post-doc within the Non-Destructive Evaluation group, developing ultrasonic measurement techniques for detecting flaws in safety-critical mechanical components.
• Developed ML-based approaches (implemented in PyTorch) to defect reconstruction from ultrasonic signals, enabling inspection of corrosion and defects in hard-to-reach locations across petrochemical plants and pipelines. This was based on simulated training data using the underlying PDE-based physics model.
• Simulated the acoustic properties of metamaterials as a hypothesised sound-damping mechanism in moth wings (a joint work with the Mathematics department).

PhD Researcher | University College London | 2014–2018

• Member of the Biomedical Ultrasound Group, developing ultrasonic therapies (cancer ablation, neuro-stimulation) and the simulation software to support them. Also collaborated with computer science researchers at Brno University of Technology.
• Contributed to k-Wave, a production-grade open-source MATLAB toolbox for acoustic simulation with over 10,000 registered users and 700+ citations.
• Focused on the computational efficiency of Fourier-collocation (spectral) methods underpinning the toolbox’s acoustic PDE solver, across four projects focussed on algorithm design.
• Authored 7 journal papers and 2 conference papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Computational Physics, Communications in Computational Physics, and IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium.

Mathematician | Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation | 2013–2014

• Sat within Computational Informatics at Australia’s national science agency, applying large-scale modelling and numerical simulation to materials science problems on HPC infrastructure:
  • Designed a polymer filter to bind and capture proteins for antimicrobial use, using molecular dynamics and metadynamics simulations (NAMD, LAMMPS).
  • Improved the lifespan of ion thrusters (spacecraft propulsion) by choosing better materials, guided by sputtering simulations.
  • Modelled transverse deformation in carbon fibres using finite-element analysis (COMSOL) to characterise elastic properties.