The fellowship provided time for personal research but also required that considerable investment in the role of e-Science Envoy. This latter role required the fellow to represent the UK e-Science/e-Research community at many international meetings on five continents, at standards bodies, and in governmental research contexts, such as the group developing the strategy for European e-Infrastructure. The fellow also hosted visiting delegations, such as those from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also helped to coordinate and lead the UK e-Science/e-Research community through heading the arrangements for an annual meeting, through running a national forum, through town meetings on key issues and by undertaking fact-finding missions. This led to several strategic reports and regular interaction with Research Councils at a time when it was difficult to sustain the value of community building and investment in e-Infrastructure.
The personal research was focused on data-intensive research and led to six major international collaborations funded by grants that are still running (see http://research.nesc.ac.uk). The application domains include: brain imaging to study acute ischemic stroke, astrophysics, rock physics, seismology, environmental sciences and biomedical microscopy image processing and several smaller-scale evaluations. This is reported in many papers (see the web site) and a book, "The Data Bonanza: Improving Knowledge Discovery for Science, Engineering and Business" to be published by John Wiley & Sons in 2012. The implementation advances include: the prototyping, EDIM1, of a scale-out, low-power consumption machine architecture for data-intensive work, the design of a language, DISPEL, for engineering distributed data streaming systems and the evaluation of a new data-intensive architecture, ADMIRE.