Dr Christine A. Kitchen
Assistant Director, University Research Technologies
Overview
She obtained her B.Sc in Chemistry from Sheffield University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Theoretical Chemistry in 2001, also awarded by Sheffield University. Her postgraduate research was performed under the guidance of Prof. B. T. Pickup at Sheffield University and Dr. J.A. Grant at Zeneca (now AstraZeneca) Pharmaceuticals.
Following the award of her doctorate, Dr Kitchen spent a further 3 years in the Molecular Modelling and Drug Design group at AstraZeneca (Alderley Park, Cheshire, UK). Here, she undertook research on a grid-based Poisson-Boltzmann model to predict the electrostatic properties of molecules, and acted as the system administrator responsible for a variety of SGI systems and a Linux Cluster.
Dr Kitchen joined the Distributed Computing (DisCo) group, part of the Computational Science and Engineering Department at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory (Warrington, UK) in January 2004. During her time at Daresbury she led the Commercial Outreach and Training activity within the DisCo group where she undertook a variety of roles, from system administrator through to interactions with Universities and Industry, providing technical expertise to assist various sites with mid-range cluster computing.