Team Mendeley is happy to announce three new members! They’re all brilliant, and terrific people to hang out with, too. The latter is rather important, because we’re going to have a roof terrace at the new office, and what fun would rooftop barbecues be without terrific people? In order of appearance and in their own words:

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Ben Dowling is a software engineer at Mendeley, working on Mendeley Web. He graduated with an MEng software engineering degree from the University of Southampton in 2006, where he continued to live and work until moving to London to work for Mendeley. He’s excited to be working on such an innovative project, and is looking forward to life in the big city!

Andi Rutherford is. And when not playing with words, and editing them on Wikipedia, he is also a software engineer for Mendeley Web, and plays a significant role by ensuring that your information is kept secure. He does this by actively trying to hack the site – no joke – this is basically what banks do to ensure your accounts are kept safe. He also has an unhealthy regard for standards, and can be found with the biggest smile when Mendeley pages pass W3C validation.

He comes to us by way of the University of Sussex, Imperial College London, King’s College London, and the Open University too! (I think you can guess how he spends his free time – not so much a bookworm as a bookrabbit). He is actively interested in design especially with regards to usability, and when not learning stuff he is aspiring to become a master calligrapher. Please note, he really does have terrible handwriting, so any level will be an easily quantifiable improvement.

Steve Ridout is a software engineer at Mendeley. He studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and completed his MSc and PhD on computational modelling at the University of Greenwich. During his PhD and later as a Research Fellow, he wrote software for mechanical stress analysis, optical modelling, and risk analysis. Steve is now helping make Mendeley the research tool he wished he had in academia.

When not writing code for Mendeley, Steve occasionally enjoys making games, films, and playing his guitar.

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Steve didn’t mention it, so I’ll bring it up: He is also the developer behind Ape Invasion, which he programmed in his spare time to teach himself ActionScript. The dialogues are sheer comic genius, so by all means go there and play the game!