Tomographic Software Year in Industry 2024

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. By accelerating electrons to near light-speed, Diamond generates brilliant beams of light from infra-red to X-rays which are used for academic and industry research and development across a range of scientific disciplines including structural biology, physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, earth and environmental sciences.

Our year in industry programme

The 12 month ‘Year in Industry’ scheme allows undergraduate students studying for a relevant degree to gain experience working in across different teams at Diamond.

You will work on your own project during the year by collaborating with your group and staff all across the organisation along with the support from your supervisor/s. Diamond has an excellent track record for helping students execute work which is valued not only by Diamond staff but also our User community. We have also welcomed previous Year in Industry students back to Diamond as they work and study towards one of our competitive joint PhD studentships or as part of our Graduate Software scheme, which shows how impactful our placements can be.

In addition to working on your own project, you will also have the opportunity to get involved with other areas of work at Diamond to gain a wider view of the full range of what our facility does. You will be encouraged to learn about research teams based at Diamond and other facilities on-site at the Harwell Campus, and to participate in public engagement events, and in communicating science to a wider audience.

See what our 2021 Year in Industry students had to say about our programme

My placement at Diamond has given me invaluable skills that I will take with me throughout my career going forward. Diamond has been an incredibly supportive environment with great people, and a very collaborative atmosphere. (Jemima, 2021 Year in Industry Engineering student)

Project title: A graphical User Interface for Tomographic software

HTTomo (short for "High Throughput Tomography") is a new Python package which is being actively developed in the Data Analysis Group by the Tomography Team. One major aim of HTTomo is to meet the needs of tomographic beamlines after the Diamond-II upgrade, which includes the need to process bigger data in larger quantities and with high fidelity.

HTTomo is a User Interface (UI) package and does not contain any data processing methods itself - it utilises other libraries, such as TomoPy, and a separate collection of methods developed at Diamond, as backends to provide the processing methods. Instead, HTTomo's job is to enable the user to flexibly define a tomographic data processing pipeline and run it on input data.

HTTomo processing pipelines are defined as YAML files, and the HTTomo documentation provides blocks of autogenerated YAML that represent methods and their parameters. These autogenerated blocks of YAML can be copied and pasted into a file to define the order of data processing methods, and then edited accordingly to represent the desired parameter configuration of the methods, thus, building a pipeline. Once a pipeline has been defined in YAML, HTTomo can then be used to run it.

Currently, interaction with HTTomo is only available through a command line interface. It is incredibly important that users at Diamond are able to use time efficiently during their beamtime to make the most of their visit. Depending on a user's experience with software tools, the training of command line tools can be both daunting and time-consuming. Additionally, having different parts of the data analysis workflow fragmented across different applications can be jarring and unintuitive, causing more wasted time during beamtime.

The aim of this project is to proceed further on improving the user experience of HTTomo by providing a web GUI for it. This will help both beamline scientists and users to process collected data quicker and without the difficulties which command line tools can create, ensuring a smoother beamtime experience.
The major components of such a GUI, motivated by the major parts of the tomographic data processing workflow, should provide the following features:

• Graphical editing of HTTomo pipeline YAML files
• Running HTTomo jobs, on either a local machine or a compute cluster
• Visualisation of the output of an HTTomo job

At the end of this project we hope to have a working prototype of a GUI containing all these components that could be deployed on a beamline workstation to drive tomographic data analysis. This project will be consolidated on the previous developments in the group. The successful student will learn the basics of tomographic imaging on synchrotrons, image processing pipelines and will collaborate with the imaging beamline scientists as well of software developers.

What we're looking for

Essential criteria for applications

• Programming experience in Python with understanding of OOP
• Familiarity with modern web-based technologies such as REACT, FastAPI, or similar
• Familiarity with a client-server models and applications for web-development, such as Flask, Django, or similar

Desirable criteria for applicants

• Knowledge of Javascript
• Container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes
• Image processing experience

This project is suitable for students following degrees in the following broad subject areas: Computer science, Physics, Mathematics.

Further information

Our Year in Industry students are paid £22,423 per annum. Training and experience are provided in the following areas:

• Presentation training to prepare for your final talk on your project
• Python programming (if applicable for your project)
• CAD Training (if applicable for your project)
• Public Engagement skills
• An internal programme of seminars and talks from leading scientists
• Tours and talks of other science facilities across the Harwell Campus

To apply

Please use the online application process to apply and tell us why you believe you are suitable for this role. You will need to either be a UK national or hold a Student visa, or otherwise have the right to work in the UK.

Placement students must be registered as an undergraduate for the duration of their time at Diamond and ensure that they can commit to the whole 12-month period (2 September 2024 - 29 August 2025). Applicants should be expecting to gain a first or 2:1 honours degree.

Where relevant, and possible for the role, we will consider flexible working arrangements, secondment and job share opportunities.

Diamond attract talented individuals from around the world and currently employ 44 different nationalities. Reflecting trends in our sector we employ more men than women (77% men and 23% women as at March 2021). Therefore, we particularly welcome applications from suitably qualified women.

If you are disabled and would like to be considered under the Disability Confident Scheme, please let us know via the online application process. Diamond are members of Working Families (the UK’s work-life balance organisation), we have also achieved the Athena SWAN Bronze award and Disability Confident Level Two.

This role does not meet the required skill level for a Skilled Worker visa and therefore we would be unable to sponsor individuals due to the current UK Home Office immigration rules. To be appointed to the role, candidates will need to have the right to work in the UK without sponsorship from us.