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In some domains, researchers have been writing software to support their work for many years. In others, software and code was not traditionally something that researchers needed to think about. As research is increasingly computational and data processing, simulation and machine learning technologies become an element in almost all areas of research, this has changed. Research Software Engineering (RSE) emerged a little over a decade ago out of the increasing need for support and career paths for researchers whose focus was writing code. These individuals, and the specialist skills and capabilities that they bring to research, now represent a significant and vital part of the research lifecycle. In this talk, Dr Cohen will look at some background to the RSE movement and why it’s important that institutions recognise the key role RSEs play in supporting and producing their research outputs. He will also discuss what can be done to address this and some different models that demonstrate how it may be implemented.

Jeremy Cohen is an Advanced Research Fellow in the Department of Computing and Director of Research Software Engineering Strategy at Imperial College London. He holds a UKRI-EPSRC Research Software Engineering fellowship and has a background in Computer Science with a PhD in Computing from Imperial. Jeremy has undertaken research software development work across a wide range of multi-disciplinary projects covering areas including Fluid Dynamics, Medical Imaging, Bioinformatics, Atmospheric Chemistry and Transport. He is actively involved in a range of RSE community activities, having started and continuing to lead both Imperial’s local Research Software Community and the RSLondon regional research software community. He is also involved in efforts to improve opportunities for training and skills development around research software best practices and in developing strategy and policies to help enhance software development skills and processes.

Research Software Engineering: Why? What? How?