Maxwell Flitton is a software engineer at the Rust open source database SurrealDB and an honorary researcher at King’s College London in surgical robotics, where he builds GPU streaming in Rust. In 2011, Maxwell achieved his bachelor of science degree in nursing from the University of Lincoln, UK, and a degree in physics from the Open University with a postgraduate diploma in physics and engineering in medicine from UCL in London while working as a nurse at Charing Cross A&E. He has worked on numerous projects, such as building the medical simulation software Clinical Metrics and supervising computational medicine students at Imperial College London. He also has experience in financial tech working on financial loss modeling engines used by companies like Nasdaq and Monolith AI. While building the medical simulation software, Maxwell and Caroline had to build Rust async systems in the Kubernetes cluster to create real-time events and caching mechanisms. Maxwell has written the Packt textbooks Rust Web Programming and Speed Up Your Python with Rust.
Caroline Morton studied medicine and international health at the University of Birmingham in the UK before moving to London to work as a doctor. She is a qualified general practitioner and completed a master’s degree in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Caroline later set up the first course in the UK training doctors and medical students to learn programming (Coding for Medicine), which later developed into a 10-week module, and wrote a textbook covering the same topic called Computational Medicine (Elsevier, 2018). In 2019, she moved to the University of Oxford to work as an epidemiologist and software developer and was key in developing OpenSAFELY, a trusted research environment that processed COVID-19 data during the pandemic. This resulted in over 60 peer-reviewed papers in journals such as Nature, The Lancet, and The BMJ. Together with Maxwell, she has developed cutting-edge techniques in Rust to solve problems in developing Clinical Metrics, a simulation product for training new doctors, the backend of which is built entirely using Rust. In 2024, Caroline started a part-time PhD in medical statistics, exploring ways to generate realistic synthetic data for electronic health research using Rust.