Chris Bates

Dr Chris Bates is a Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering, Graphics, and Multimedia at the School of Computing and Digital Technologies, part of the College of Business, Technology and Engineering at Sheffield Hallam University. He leads undergraduate recruitment for the department and focuses on teaching programming languages, software frameworks, and functional programming. His research examines the social aspects of programming, including how developers communicate and collaborate, informed by ethnography and conversation analysis. He has a background in parallel and distributed systems and led the EU-funded Odyssey project, which developed secure data-sharing platforms for EU police forces.

Teaching responsibilities include BEng/MEng Software Engineering, BSc Computer Science, and specialized courses like 'Fundamentals of Programming Languages' and 'Applications Architectures'. Research affiliations include the Communication and Computing Research Centre and Culture and Creativity Research Institute. He has supervised a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project and serves as an external examiner at the University of Sheffield.

Publications span software engineering, pattern recognition, and database performance analysis. His work emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, combining technical innovation with social science methodologies.