Professor Simon Hettrick is Deputy Director of the Software Sustainability Institute and a Director of the Southampton Research Software Group.

He works with stakeholders from across the research community to develop policies that support research software, the people who develop that software and the researchers who rely on it. Simon's research focuses on the use of software in the research community with the aim of understanding practices and demographics. In this role, he conducted the first study of software reliance in academia.

Simon is a passionate advocate for Research Software Engineers. He orchestrated a campaign to gain recognition for this community, which has grown from a handful of people in 2013 to a substantial international community numbering in the tens of thousands. He was the founding chair of the UK's Association of Research Software Engineers and was a founding Trustee and Treasurer of the Society of Research Software Engineering. He was treasurer of the RSE conference 2016-2019. Simon is Chair of the Hidden REF: a campaign to increase the diversity of research outputs recognised by academia and raise awareness of the hidden roles that make research possible.

Simon is one of the Directors of the Southampton Research Software Group based at the University of Southampton. The group makes research software engineering expertise available to researchers across the University, provides training in software engineering and reproducible research and encourages collaboration and the sharing of knowledge between researchers who rely on software.

He is a member of the Projects Peer Review Panel (large projects) for the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Data Science Strategic advisory board for the Medical Research Council, the advisory panel for Artificial Intelligence and Informatics at the Rosalind Franklin Institute, the steering committee for the STFC's Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, the advisory board of the Technician TALENT programme, and the Advisory Board for the data-science journal Patterns. Simon was a member of the UKRI e-infrastructure expert group and chair of the working group on software and skills. He has a background in physics and patent law.