I'm a post-doc doing mainly (active) thermography work (for non-destructive testing). Lots of data analysis, image processing, etc.

Before that PhD (vehicle driveability analysis) and degree in Mechanical Engineering with German.

I learned Basic and VB as a kid, then OPL using a succession of Psions (Psion Organiser II, Psion 3, 3a, 5), programming using VB/VBA for my father's company (wrote stock control and invoicing system for a car dealership as the car supplier didn't do one and I said I could do better than paper stock records - interesting work, especially talking to the non-computer literate people who were using my system to work out what they wanted/didn't want).

At uni did some placement work writing/tweaking CFD code (FORTRAN) and now deal mainly in MATLAB and Simulink with a bit of C and C++ thrown in for good measure. I learned C to program my Zaurus and picked up C++ along the way as some of the day-job involves tweaking other companies' code to do what I want it to.