The Surfability team
From left to
right, our management team is:Dr. Dan Azzopardi, Company Secretary,
Dr. Mark I. Williams, Managing Director,
& Dr. Paul Dixon, Technical Director.
The Surfability team has over two decades of experience of working within three large particle physics Collaborations based in Geneva (ALEPH), Hamburg (H1) and California (BaBar). Their complete redesign of the BaBar website in 1999 was a great success which led to Mark Williams' Enterprise Fellowship in October 2000, and the incorporation of Surfability Ltd in February 2001.
Management team profiles
We have amassed considerable expertise in data analysis techniques, Internet technologies, project management, usability and web design.
- Dr. Mark Williams, Managing Director and founder, has a Masters degree in "New Venture Creation" and is responsible for the day-to-day running of the business. As a postgraduate student at CERN in Geneva - where the web was born - he worked on two major software projects: a real-time, parallel software system for processing PET scans and a silicon detector performance monitor. As a senior software developer at Stanford University in California, he managed the BaBar web improvement project, and created various tools using C++, Perl and XML. He is currently on the board of the UA-WG, which is aiming to devise practical initiatives to remedy social exclusion from the Internet.
- Dr. Paul Dixon, Technical Director, is a highly regarded Systems Manager who maintained the Microsoft Windows NT, Solaris and Linux systems at Queen Mary Physics Department for almost five years. Prior to that, while writing up his PhD thesis, he managed a cluster of Macintosh computers for Lancaster University's School for English Language Education. He developed software with Dr. Williams to restructure the BaBar intranet/website and he is the co-creator of the Surfability ScaleTM suite of website analysis tools.
- Dr. Daniel Azzopardi, Company Secretary, is a database specialist and an experienced programmer for the gaming and financial software industries. He is also an accomplished, mathematician, research scientist and data analyst.
Other team members
- Joanna Pollard, Graphic Artist, provides designs for websites and other marketing materials such as brochures and advertisements. Joanna worked with us on the Moorgate Group and e-search website redesigns.
- Nicholas Spowart, Industrial Designer, is our Macromedia Flash expert. In September 2003 he completed an educational cartoon for Surfability entitled "Monie's misadventures in Cyberspace".