Wout de Nolf / Data Analysis Engineer

“At the ESRF, I can focus on what I’m good at and concentrate on doing what I enjoy doing. For me, that’s the best type of motivation and one that will last a long time. I trained in analytical chemistry and, although I had dabbled in programming for several years, I started making software tools to analyse data while studying for my PhD. I was probably attracted to the world of synchrotrons because I was more interested in the techniques used than actually doing the experiments themselves. Synchrotrons employ many different techniques to cater for the wide range of samples studied there. Also, because synchrotron X-rays span a wide spectrum, they offer many different types of interaction with the samples. Different techniques and different interactions with the X-rays rely on different tools for data analysis.

When I arrived at the ESRF in 2015, I worked for 5 years as a scientist, collaborating with other scientists, exploring the vast array of synchrotron techniques and developing tools to help interpret experimental data sets. When I shared my vision of the challenges that lay ahead for data analysis, the ESRF asked me to think about possible solutions. Almost inevitably, I sidestepped into a career dedicated to data analysis and software engineering. I had often toyed with the idea of a single product that would pull together the fundamentals of the multitude of data analysis tools out there and serve as a foundation on which to grow the scientific software of the future. Today, I’m working on this project. It’s called EWOKS. It takes everything that is common in the existing software and provides workflows that are shareable across beamlines, synchrotrons and other instruments like neutron sources. The data analysis environment has changed radically in the past 5 years or so. The sheer immensity of the data sets produced by an instrument like EBS means that automation is an absolute essential in data analysis. In EWOKS, we optimize resources, enabling the scientists to just focus on the science and not worry about the software.”

Wout De Nolf grew up in Belgium and studied Chemistry at the University of Antwerp. His PhD on X-ray Powder Diffraction imaging involved performing synchrotron experiments. In 2015, he started as a Post-Doc at ID21 to set up data processing pipelines for spectroscopy. This work caught the attention of the Data Automation Unit at the ESRF, where he was hired in 2020 as a Data Analysis Engineer. Continuing his pursuit of automation on a larger scale than his PhD and at ID21, he developed the Ewoks (ESRF Workflow System), which is currently the basis for all efforts at the ESRF in the automation of data processing and beamline control.