The United States (US) Research Software Engineer Community
The increasing use of digital technologies across research communities has gone hand in hand with a strong growth and reliance on software written or customized to solve research problems. This in turn is driving dialog around opportunities to
- improve the development of, and
- incentivize useful sharing, curation, and ongoing maintenance of
research software artifacts and related knowledge.
Of course, research software does not develop, curate, or maintain itself. Accordingly, widespread research software growth has included emerging roles for people who create, maintain, and contribute to the research software ecosystem. These roles can bring value directly through enabling specific research projects. They also bring value indirectly, through helping ensure enduring impact of research software innovations and by facilitating adequate reproducibility standards in digital science.
Positions like data steward, information manager, research data officer, research software engineer, research supporter, cyberinfrastructure engineer, campus champion, research computing facilitator, bioinformatician and other titles are increasingly found as core roles in research teams.
Initiatives in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere are bringing together the community of people writing and contributing to research software at the national and international level. In the US this encompasses universities, laboratories, knowledge institutes, companies and other enterprises. This site is part of that effort.
Joining the US-RSE Community is easy!
We maintain both a mailing list for announcements and updates as well as a Slack channel for conversations.
- Signup to our mailing list to stay informed about any activities!
- Join our slack channel
What is a Research Software Engineer?
Research Software Engineers (RSEs) are professional roles that closely collaborate with discipline researchers to understand questions they are studying, and then develop applications and software systems to help address those questions. Many RSEs started out as researchers who spent a lot of time developing software to do their own research. Others have started as software developers who have developed a strong affinity with the research process.
While the RSEs are increasingly valuable to the research community, they lack a formal place in the professional academic system. This can create challenges around long-term software sustainability, curation, and continuity. This in turn potentially impacts reproducibility of digital insights and results, that is fundamental to credible research.
The term Research Software Engineer was created as a way to catalyze more effective professionalization of these roles. The goal is to mutually benefit the integrity of the digital research processes, further increase impact of digital approaches, and to improve career trajectories of capable practitioners that underpin these activities. We are working, together with RSE associations in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere to highlight the RSE role, and to connect the broad RSE community in the United States together.