Episode
Verity Allan: From ancient words to distant worlds
- Podcast
- People doing Physics
- Published
- Dec 4, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2050
- Processing state
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- https://people-doing-physics.captivate.fm/episode/verity-allan
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Summary
Today we’re joined by Verity Allan, who works as a project manager, developer, and programmer of architecture and software for the Square Kilometre Array, which will be the world's largest radio telescope. A graduate of Cambridge, Oxford, and The Open University, Verity came to Cambridge from a town in the Midlands to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. How did she go from studying ancient languages, to coding, designing security for telescope software systems, and pursuing a PhD in high performance computing for astrophysics? These are just some of the twists and turns we hope to explore in our chat with Verity. Stay with us. Useful Links: Explore | SKAO - Learn more about the two largest telescope arrays in the world Ross Anderson's book on Security Engineering, mentioned by Verity, is available at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rja14/book.html (all three editions plus some videos) Verity wrote two papers on the history of scientific computing: The Cavendish Computors: The women working in scientific computing for Radio Astronomy and Scientific Computing in the Cavendish Laboratory and the pioneering women Computors Learn more about Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics - The University of Manchester and about our Astrophysics work in Cambridge . Share and join the conversation Help us get better by taking our quick survey . Your feedback will help us understand how we can improve in the future. Thank you! If you like this episode don’t forget to rate it and leave a review on your favourite podcast app. It really helps others to find us. Any comment about the podcast or question you would like to ask our physicists, email us at [email protected] or join the conversation&n…