Research Engineer

Dr Joshua Simmons

Bachelor of Engineering (Civil)
PhD (Coastal Engineering)

Josh completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney). His PhD in coastal engineering focussed on the use of numerical models in forecasting coastal erosion. From this work emerged an interest in applying data-driven methods to earth science problems. While his background has been on problems in the coastal space including shoreline modelling, more broadly Josh enjoys working across DARE’s problem domains to apply interpretable machine learning/data science approaches. A particular interest is in the application of Earth Observation data to inform spatio-temporal modelling. Uncertainty quantification and understanding is usually a large component of the projects Josh works on and as such, Bayesian methods underly most of his modelling with a specific focus on hierarchical modelling approaches.

Josh is heavily involved in DARE’s projects with industry partners, mostly in the water domain, and has a background in consulting engineering. He has a passion for collaborative projects embracing DARE’s philosophy of fully integrating domain expertise into data science approaches to address industry needs. As a DARE research engineer he also spends time supporting DARE’s students and postdocs with various computing needs, providing expertise in coding, HPC and the use of probabilistic programming libraries for Bayesian inference.