July 29, 2026
Profile photo of Felicity Chun
In this article we speak with Felicity Chun, a Senior Research Software Engineer in ACCESS-NRI’s Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team.
Where did you grow up, and how did you come to be part of the ACCESS-NRI team?
I grew up in Melbourne. I studied at the University of Melbourne and did a Bachelor of Environment majoring in Geomatics and later went back and did a Masters of IT in the spatial stream. While I was living in Mackay, Queensland, I saw an inviting ad and was interested in working closer to science and extending my software skills. I also wanted to move back a tad closer to Melbourne, despite the cold, so I applied and met some lovely people.
Tell us a bit about your career before joining ACCESS-NRI.
I liked the idea of working both indoors and outdoors and for my first graduate job I was a Mine Surveyor in an open pit mine in the Pilbara, Western Australia. I enjoyed the FIFO life from Perth for a few years before wanting to be more technical, and went back to Melbourne for a Masters of IT. In my final year I worked part time at a sort of startup called DAS (Digital Agriculture Services Pty Ltd) with some data wrangling and spatial tooling for their platform.
After graduating I decided to go hang out in Canada where I did an exchange semester and went back to doing survey work while I was there, gaining wisdom tidbits from a range of survey party chiefs. I came back to Australia for warmer weather and lived in sunny Queensland doing GIS project work as part of the environment and planning team in engineering consulting.
What do you do at ACCESS-NRI, and what excites you about this work?
I’m part of the Model Evaluation and Diagnostics (MED) team at ACCESS-NRI where I assist with evaluating and comparing model outputs with other datasets including other CMIP data and observations. I collaborate internationally with Research Software Engineers on developing and maintaining ESMValTool, which is an Earth System Model evaluation software package and with Obs4MIPs panel which collates observational datasets for use in model intercomparison projects. In my role, I am also part of the ACCESS-Hive Docs team to help maintain that documentation website. I am constantly learning in this role, and I like to assist a range of people, including in my team, recently as part of some visualisation projects.
Felicity’s dog Patrick, sandy at the beach
What do you like to do outside of work?
I have been playing some community AFL which I started in Queensland – this forces me to run around and be outside in winter and meet a lovely group of women. Otherwise, I really enjoy eating, even more with friends. I also love teasing and exercising my dog named Patrick.