Hi! My name is Kamil Hepak1.

I’m a Research Computing Support Engineer at the Norwich Bioscience Institutes Partnership. In this role I support the maintenance and administration of the Institutes’ shared high-performance computing and data storage platform, and work with researchers at the Institutes to help them leverage it most effectively.

I’m also finishing my MSc by Research in the Haerty Group at the Earlham Institute (formally registered at the University of East Anglia). In this role I’m developing Muex, a Snakemake pipeline for the identification and analysis of novel microexons from long-read RNA-seq data. See my institute profile page here.

Before this, I completed my integrated Master’s degree2 in Computer Science at Durham University (where I was a proud member of Josephine Butler College), graduating in 2022. My master’s thesis focused on efficient text indexing algorithms for evolutionary distance estimation.

I’m interested in lots of different things. Below are the ones I spend most of my time thinking about or doing, in no particular order - feel free to get in touch with me about any of them.

Professional

  • 🖥️ research computing, broadly encompassing:
    • high-performance computing and system administration
    • computational research support and facilitation
    • research software engineering
  • 🌱 sustainability & energy-efficiency in computing
  • 🎓 education and training delivery
  • 🧬 bioinformatics and computational biology
  • 💾 efficient algorithms and data structures for bioinformatics
  • 🔓 open and equitable science
  • 📣 science communication and public engagement
  • 🧑‍🔬 improving treatment and recognition of postgraduate researchers, research technicians & support specialists

Personal

  • 🎮 video games
  • 🎲 tabletop (board + card) games
  • 🏃‍♂️ running
  • 🥏 ultimate frisbee
  • 🎸 rock music (in all its weird and wonderful varieties and subgenres)
  • 📚 reading (mostly scifi & fantasy fiction; mostly history & pop-science non-ficiton)

  1. In English (especially British-accented), my given name is pronounced ka-MIL, rhymes with hill, stress on the second syllable. My family name is pronounced HE-pak, “he” like in “help” not “here”, stress on the first syllable. In other languages (like my native Polish) it’s different, but I mostly interact with people in English so I hope this explainer helps. One day I’ll upload an audio recording here, so you can listen to me speak my name - watch this space. ↩︎

  2. In the English university system, an integrated Master’s degree is a four-year course which combines a bachelor’s and master’s degree into one course. My degree, an MEng, is a second cycle qualification in the Bologna Process framework. ↩︎