UEA researcher honoured for promoting open-source development
By: Communications
UEA researcher Dr Joseph Wright has been listed in the OpenUK’s 2024 New Year’s Honours List as one of the ‘Social Influencers of Open Source’.
Many of the computing innovations we use in day-to-day life have been driven by open standards and open-source development. Most obvious of these is the internet, originally developed to be robust against any single point of failure: openness was required from the start. The continued development and promotion of open ideas is perhaps ever more important as computing is increasingly central to our lives and there are more opportunities to put up barriers.
Academics across the globe use a system called LaTeX for writing their papers. This is an open-source system, letting them type ideas from complex maths and physics to linguistics in an open system. It is a free software system and can be extended by anyone.
Dr Joseph Wright, a UEA researcher from the School of Chemistry, has been involved in LaTeX development for more than 15 years. He first used LaTeX to support his teaching and chemistry research, then became involved in pushing forward chemistry support, and then extending the core to help deliver accessible outputs. As part of this work, Joseph has engaged in promoting LaTeX to new users through websites like Learn LaTeX and TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange.
These efforts to promote LaTeX, an open technology, to a wide range of potential users has now been recognised by OpenUK, with Joseph listed in the 2024 New Year’s Honours List as one of the ‘Social Influencers of Open Source’.
Joseph said: "It's always great to be recognised. This was a big surprise and I'm very happy to be in such great company."
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