Marius Retegan / Software Development Engineer

“I started my career as a theoretical chemist, and even when I was working as a scientist, I was developing algorithms and interacting with people to help them with their computational needs. Today, I work with the spectroscopy beamlines at the ESRF to develop tools to process and interpret experimental data. The computational side of an experiment – all the mathematical calculations - can be overwhelming and a hurdle for many people. Today’s scientists have different expectations from scientists in the past regarding the complexity of the tools used for these tasks, and the amount of time they want to dedicate to them. Our goal is to provide user-friendly open-source tools that allow them to analyse their data and test different hypotheses without having to navigate through their inherent complexity. It means these processes are accessible to a broader audience. It also means getting results faster and being able to analyse large volumes of data in less time, accelerating the phase between data collection and publication. In these developments, one of our main concerns is to ensure that the results are correct and reproducible. I enjoy being able to offer tools that simplify the computational tasks of our users and to know that I’ve made life easier for them!”

Marius grew up in Romania and studied chemistry and physics at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. He obtained a PhD in physical chemistry from Joseph Fourier University (currently Grenoble Alpes University)  in Grenoble. Before joining the ESRF in 2016, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany.