Interviews with the EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellows

April 18th, 2016 | Categories: programming, RSE, Scientific Software | Tags:

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the UK’s main agency for funding research in engineering and the physical sciences. In 2015, they made a very unusual type of fellowship call – one that was targeted specifically at Research Software Engineers. This was the first fellowship of its kind in the world  and I believe it represents a strong commitment by EPSRC to the improvement of research software.

Research Software Engineers are the people behind research software. They make a huge contribution to science but often lack reward and recognition for the work that they do. This fellowship is a huge step in the right direction to providing some of that recognition. Quoting from the call document:

This call will support Research Software Engineer (RSE) Fellowships for a period of up to five years. The RSE Fellowship describes exceptional individuals with combined expertise in programming and a solid knowledge of the research environment. The Research Software Engineer works with researchers to gain an understanding of the problems they face, and then develops, maintains and extends software to provide the answers.

201 people responded to the call with an ‘Intent to submit’ outline application. Of these, 7 were successful. As part of my work with the EPSRC funded Research Software Engineering Network (RSE-N), I got in touch with the new cohort of RSE fellows and interviewed them about their projects and careers.

Follow the links below to see what they had to say.

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