Dr Benjamin O'Driscoll

Ben joined PML in April 2022 shortly after completing his PhD in Graphene Biosensing from the University of Plymouth. Throughout his studies, Ben developed a passion for the automated processing, analysis and visualisation of data, skills that he has continued to develop in his current role at PML within the Digital Innovation and Marine Autonomy (DIMA) group.

Ben is a trained physicist, studying Physics (BSc) at the University of Warwick between 2010-2013. After his undergraduate degree, Ben worked in industry as a marine sensing analyst where he embraced all things data. In his current role, Ben enjoys the challenge of handling vast collections of data, producing useful data insights and presenting these in a user-friendly manner.

Key Projects

• 2024-Present: Aquatic Pollution from Light and Anthropogenic Noise (AquaPLAN) (EU)
  • Leveraging xarray and matplotlib packages to efficiently process, manipulate and visualise large geospatial datasets.
  • Scalable scripts developed to optimise processing across compute clusters using SLURM to manage resources.
• 2023-Present: ProBleu Catalogue of Teaching Aids (EU)
  • Fullstack application involving file translation pipeline used to host multi-lingual water literacy materials.
  • Application harnesses Django to manage back-end server-side logic, communicating with a PostgreSQL database whilst Celery provides asynchronous processing support.
• 2024-2025 – Synchronising Earth Observation and Modelling Towards a Digital Twin Ocean (SyncED-Ocean)
  • Digitial twin demonstrator combining data from satellite Earth Observations, marine autonomous platforms and marine system models
  • Operational processing involving the continual downloading of asset datasets
  • Post mission development of visualisation portal for high level decision support tool.
• 2024: eDNA QC Application (Data Map)
  • Data science R and R Shiny applet facilitating the manipulation of eDNA datasets to conduct data exploration, analysis and visualisation.
• 2023: Generating FAIR data from high resolution sensors (NERC – Constructing Digitial Environments)
  • Project designed to improve the management, access and discoverability of data from the Western Channel Observatory (WCO). Flask plotting API developed with the bokeh package to enhance data visualisation and user interactivity
• 2023: Offshore Renewable Impacts on Ecosystem Services (ORIES) (Garfield Weston)
  • PostGIS database design, pandas and psycopg2 packages used to merge geospatial and tabular datasets which feed into decision support tool providing data insights for high level users.