Collegeville Workshop 2020

CW20 brings community members together to advance developer productivity for scientific software

This project is maintained by Collegeville

Sustainable Research Software Engineering

Teatime theme - Collegeville 2020

Sunita Chandrasekaran - University of Delaware

Many domain scientists have large RSE requirements in their daily project work, but must recruit and acquire RSE staffing on a per-project basis. Unlike other critical resource staff such as research librarians and IT specialists, RSEs tend to be directly funded by “soft” money and their positions are at risk in between projects.

Scientific progress increasingly requires RSE contributions. We clearly see the increasing role of software in science and the need for RSEs to work with and train domain scientists. In addition, emerging activities such as hackathons bring teams together who have limited computer science expertise and computational scientists come with limited domain expertise. That gap needs to be bridged by RSEs!

In this tea time session, we would like to discuss how to make RSE a program in academia. To accelerate progress, we need the force to be driven from labs and industries. Job ads and eligibility criteria need to include an RSE component. This will provide a great push for academia to take this more seriously and actually cultivate an RSE program.