Meet the Researcher: Maxim Filimonov

What is your main area of research?   

I have been involved in multiple projects, and I have been working at Cardiff University as a Research Software Engineer for five years. So basically, if anyone needs research or software engineering help, they contact us, and we support them with anything they might require.

Why did you become a researcher?

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be an astronaut and I know that to become an astronaut you have to be smart and know science, mathematics and physics, so at my university I was studying mathematics and physics. Unfortunately, I couldn’t become an astronaut but now I’m a researcher, so I do the research, and I like inventing new things.

Is there any particular aspect of your research that you would like to highlight?

My current main project is the real time early assessment of tsunamis. We analyse acoustic-gravity waves generated by earthquakes and we are able to predict tsunami probabilities across the globe. The developed system can perform the full analysis in minutes, so we can issue early warnings as soon as possible. But most importantly we can reduce the number of false alarms.

What are the next steps for your research project?

The next steps of the project is to implement the system in one of the tsunami warning centres somewhere in the Pacific ideally because most earthquakes happen in the Pacific region. We’d like to have our system there so it can be used for the real time earthquake analysis and tsunami assessment in real scenarios.

Does your research have global impact?

Tsunamis happen everywhere and they can be really devastating. Some tsunamis, they cost many, many lives – so what we want to do, we want to be able to issue warnings earlier so that people can evacuate. It can be very impactful for coastal regions. If our system is used, then we can actually save lives.

What has been your greatest achievement as a researcher?

The project was shortlisted last year for the research project of the year in the Higher Education Awards in the UK. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but there’s always next year!

Is there anything else you’d like to highlight that we haven’t covered?

Another project I’ve worked on was a web application for the NHS. This web application was for managing the workload of nurses. So, what they did, they scored their work on each and every patient based on certain factors that we developed, and then the senior nurses could manage the workload of staff better and help fill gaps where necessary.

I guess the best part of being a researcher is that I’m always able to learn new things but most importantly I can also apply those things in my work and that makes it very exciting. All the projects are very different so I can use a variety of technologies and even programming languages which is amazing, so I like this job!