Research Software Engineering - A new academic career pathway

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“Researchers, funders and universities now recognise that UK research depends on software. 92% of researchers depend on software to conduct and analyse their research. 56% of researchers develop their own research software. However, 71% of researchers have no formal training in software development. This has lead to a crisis of reproducibility in many fields, as it is challenging (if not impossible) for many pieces of research or analysis software to run on anything other than the laptops of the original researcher. The career of Research Software Engineering has been created to help address this problem. Research Software Engineers have experience and training in both software engineering and domain research. They help ensure that software is written to be portable and reproducible, enabling software to be sustained between projects and shared with the wider academic and industrial community. In this talk I will discuss what Research Software Engineers do, the growth of RSE groups in universities across the country, and provide some examples of why it is so important to change research culture so that researchers learn and adopt core software engineering best practice (e.g. version control and testing).” -Dr. Christopher Woods

Lecturer: Dr. Christopher Woods

Date: 18/12/18

Time: 1-2pm

Room: Queens 1.18

Summary

The lecturer briefly (in the 1 hour that we had the room for) described and explained to us the current landscape of the research world. In his analysis he pointed out a huge shortcoming in the way in which research has been conducted, the main one being non-reproducible results from programmes developed by researchers. For those interested in Research Software Engineering, this was a good overview of what this new career pathway entails, and for others, it showed a fully recognised support academic for researchers who are unfamiliar with programming.

The event was a successful one. Approx 20-30 students attended and there was good interaction with the lecturer before and after the event. Even though we didn’t have the budget for food/drinks after the event (which would have increased the turnout), it was excellent that there were many students interested in Research Software Engineering and the implications this new career has in research.

* Slides from the lecture are available here and the facebook event is here.