AWS Public Sector Blog

Ray Rogers

Author: Ray Rogers

Ray Rogers is the customer reference owner for Amazon Web Services (AWS) worldwide public sector. She loves talking to customers to learn about the innovative ways they use AWS to further their work.

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences.

How researchers at The University of Manchester explore magnetic properties of molecules with the AWS Cloud

Dr. Nicholas Chilton and his research group at The University of Manchester’s Department of Chemistry in the School of Natural Sciences investigate the magnetic properties of molecules for high-density storage, quantum computing, and applications like MRI contrast agents. He turned to the cloud when the university’s onsite HPC cluster couldn’t provide the high-throughput compute power needed to answer his research questions.

Fix This episode 5: human trafficking can end

Human trafficking can end: Fix This Podcast January round up

This month, the Fix This podcast focused on how technology can be used to end human trafficking. To raise awareness of the issue, we interviewed leaders who are committed to finding solutions to the problem. Listen to episodes five and six now, featuring interviews with Thorn, Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), The Freedom Seal, and Unseen UK. The episodes are available for streaming and download on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Overcast, iHeartRadio, and via RSS.

doctor with arms crossed holding a stethescope

Grand River Hospital builds data lake on AWS, achieves “seamless business continuity”

In 2019, Grand River Hospital turned to AWS to build the first AWS healthcare data lake in Canada. The data lake was built to house the hospital’s sensitive patient and administrative data while retiring its legacy hospital information systems, comprised of electronic patient record and other administrative systems. Grand River Hospital in Ontario, Canada is a 580-bed community hospital with a yearly operating budget of around $400 million CAD serving a community of 600,000-650,000 people.

kids playing on a computer

Gamifying math education: How Prodigy uses AWS to scale and process 20 million questions daily

Prodigy Game (Prodigy) has a mission to help every child in the world love learning and make education freely available to students globally. Prodigy’s math game – geared toward learners in the first to eighth grade – allows students to hone their math skills with questions delivered according to their individual needs. As their user base grew, so did the strain on their ability to handle the increasing demands. They turned to AWS.

Connect Our Kids People Search system architecture

Finding kids in foster care permanent homes: AWS powers People Search by Connect Our Kids

Connect Our Kids, a Virginia-based 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization, is using technology to connect children in foster care with permanent homes with People Search. People Search is a free search engine powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that makes it easier for social workers to find people connected to the child.

genomics DNA image

Tracking global antimicrobial resistance among pathogens using Nextflow and AWS

The Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance (CGPS) is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge and The Big Data Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Much of its work involves collaborating with laboratories around the world to enhance genomic surveillance by using big data, engineering, training, and genomic capacity building. Ultimately, the Centre hopes to enable the linking and real-time interpretation of data globally to track pathogens and antimicrobial resistance at an affordable rate. Typically, spikes in cost for research are a common challenge for laboratories. With the cloud, the team wanted to mitigate their costs, and particularly those of their partners in low and middle-income countries, by exploring the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud’s pay-as-you-go infrastructure.

Purolator courier delivery vehicle

Purolator, Canada’s express courier company, finds new ways to better serve customers with the cloud

Purolator, Canada’s leading courier company, embarked on a bold transformation plan to keep it at the forefront of evolving customer expectations. Called Delivering the Future, the company recently launched an aggressive five-year $1B investment plan to step-change its company in four key areas – including accelerating the digital experience for customers by investing in new technology and modernizing its existing infrastructure using cloud technology.

To democratise educational access and experience for millions of students worldwide, CDSM depends on the cloud

CDSM Interactive Solutions Ltd (CDSM), founded in 1998, is a multi-faceted EdTech company that provides bespoke e-learning services and Thinqi, a next generation learning management system (LMS), to the state education sector. We spent some time with two of CDSM’s more senior colleagues, Steve Finch, Head of Marketing, and Darren Wallace, Chief Technical Officer, both of whom have been with CDSM since the early 2000s.