Rosie Brigham
Rosie Brigham is a researcher, software engineer, technologist and thought leader for citizen collected data. Her main interests are building fantastic technological tools, software development and the intersection between heritage conservation and software. She is an experienced technical project manager, full stack web developer and software educator based in the South West, UK.
Having finished her acclaimed PhD research, Rosie is looking for new opportunities. If you have an available role within product management or software development with a focus on either a Rails, Node, React or Python/Pytorch stack, get in touch.
Education
Rosie graduated from University College London (UCL) in 2013 with a BA degree in History of Art with Material Studies.
In 2016, she was awarded the Professor Malcolm Grant Scholarship and returned to UCL to pursue a Master of Research (MRes) in Heritage Science. Here, she was able to combine her expertise in software and web development, with her passion for history and conservation. During this period she developed the first iteration of Monument Monitor in partnership with Historic Environment Scotland, a platform that utilises vistor photographs to aid heritage sites conservation monitoring. This research has been published in the prestigious journal Angewadte Chemie (impact factor 15.3).
This work led to Rosie pursuing a PhD in Citizen Science, Heritage Science and Software Engineering, completed in September 2021. The main product of this research, an advanced AI-Driven Monument Monitor, is described in full below.
Rosie Brigham
Tech Career
After leaving university, Rosie joined the first cohort of CodeFirst: Girls, a pioneering organization established by Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford (founders of Entreprenuer First), where she was trained in Agile and web development. She then joined Funding Circle as a technical intern training in Rails, CSS, Javascript and HTML.
Rosie subsequently joined Wool and the Gang in 2014 as a full stack web developer. As well as honing her knitting skills, she managed numerous successful projects, quickly learning different tool and technologies. Simultaneously, Rosie transitioned from CodeFirst: Girls alumni to educator, becoming a lead facilitator and teacher to deliver evening classes teaching women the basics of web development. These eight-week practical courses took students through the fundamentals of HTML, CSS & JS alongside responsive design, Git & GitHub, Agile and best programming practices. At this point she also assisted Rik Lomas in delivering the first in person ‘Learn to Code’ course which subsequently developed into SuperHi, an innovative technical education platform.
In January 2016 she purchased a one-way ticket to New Zealand and travelled across the country with her laptop, earning bread and board as a freelance web developer for small businesses lacking the necessary internal capability. During this time, Rosie travelled to Australia to work as a workshop facilitator for Decoded. After several months she settled in Wellington, NZ and joined Enspiral Dev Academy as a Lead Facilitator, where she was responsible for delivering content and mentoring students the art of programming in a 12 week intensive bootcamp.
Rosie was awarded a scholarship by UCL and left New Zealand to pursue an MRes in Heritage Science. Upon completion, she joined the development team at Soho House to enhance her skills as a ruby engineer. Successful projects included the creation of custom APIs for membership processing, and updating and maintaining 56 legacy sites, including a full GDPR compliance rollout. Rosie continued working with CodeFirst: Girls to deliver their flagship evening classes and led the development of new, interactive curriculum topics that aligned with the latest software engineering practices.
In September 2017, Rosie began a PhD at UCL to develop an AI-driven citizen science platform, building on the original version of Monument Monitor. Throughout her PhD research Rosie freelanced on a number of projects, including the Voices Through Time and the spin-off Dinosaur Monitor project.
Currently she is working as a fulls stack software engineer for Laka, who aim to rewrite the rules of insurance by pinoeering a co-operative model. This new adventure has added a couple of new programming lanuguages to the stack, including Node.js, Typescript and Golang. With Laka, Rosie has completed her AgilePM Practitioners certification.
Monument Monitor
Monument Monitor is a ground-breaking research project founded which utilises visitors' photographs of heritage sites in their care and conservation. Founded by Rosie in 2018, the project utilises machine learning and environmental modelling at participating heritage sites to help predict how they will be affected by the changing climate.
Alongside developing the project, website and branding Rosie also developed the software, machine learning models and the research methodology alongside managing a group of 20+ different stakeholders across the two partnering organisations, Historic Environment Scotland and The Institute for Sustainable Heritage.
Rosie has presented the findings of this research at a variety of conferences including DigiDoc, ICC, ACHS and ICOM-CC 2020. Watch this space for future publications currently in the works.
Teaching and Outreach
Throughout her career Rosie has been a passionate advocate for getting more women into technical positions. Alongside her work with CodeFirst: Girls she is an active mentor, helping women advance their career through technical instruction and support. Over the years she has spoken at a variety of events sharing her experience to encourage more women into coding positions including the CodeFirst: Girls Annual Conference 2015, Stack Overflow Developers meetup, and the Digital Shoreditch Festival 2015 and London Techmakers, among others.
During her PhD she developed numerous short instructor-led courses to assist researchers with their technical skills including "Introduction to github", "Github for Researchers" and "Creating a website for your PhD project".
In 2019 she developed and ran the first Heritage Science Hackathon, designed to bring together experienced technologists with small heritage institutions that lacked technical capacity within their volunteer workforce. The event was a great success and was awarded £10,000 of follow-on impact funding from EPSRC.
During her PhD she supervised several MSC students in field of Citizen Science, Machine Learning and Machine Vision and helped develop a pioneering an MSC module on Citizen Science in Heritage. She has lectured on topics of citizen science, data science and machine vision.
Contact
Rosie is looking for new opportunities. If you have an available role within product management or software development with a focus on either a Rails, React or Python/Pytorch stack, get in touch at rosiebrigham@gmail.com.