Through comprehensive programmes and collaborations, the RSE team's objective is to lead, support and guide the research community in leveraging software and data engineering to produce excellent research.
As data and research methods are becoming more complex and more computationally demanding, our mission is to ensure that all researchers and aspiring researchers have access to the necessary expertise to be proficient in developing and maintaining advanced research software tools.
The RSE team is supported by the School of Computer Science, IT Services and the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
The RSE team works on more than 30 projects a year with successful collaborations in each Faculty of the University. We have a wide range of expertise, from Machine learning and AI (including LLM and agentic AI), code optimisation and performance, GPU computing, general software development with high standard software engineering practice, developing infrastructure and computational workflows, data science/visualisation, etc.
Collaboration span various lengths, from a few weeks to longer term partnerships of multiple years. Our team has a track record of successful funding applications either as PI or as co-Is and thrives to build new collaboration. If you want to find more about, please consult our collaboration page.
Whether you need quick coding advice or dedicated project support, discover how our team can help advance your research software.
Get two days of focused RSE support to help improve your research software.
Find out moreWe organise and run many events throughout the year - including training, seminars & workshops.
The RSE Team participates in a wide range of training and teaching activities. We provide training for people who work with code for research to build their skills in areas that academic training might not provide.
We have developed training courses for the University of Sheffield which have been recognised and adopted by external organisations. Additionally, we lead and co-lead academic modules at undergraduate and PhD levels within the university.
Dedicated training on how to apply FAIR principles to research software, enabling you to make your research more open.
FAIR² 4 RSFounded in 2016, the University of Sheffield RSE team applies expert software engineering techniques across a wide range of academic disciplines. As permanent research partners, we provide long-term continuity—eliminating recruitment overhead and ensuring critical software expertise stays within the University.
Read the latest University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter
Romain Thomas with Edwin Brown, Shaun Donnelly, Martin Dyer, Michael Foster, Joe Heffer, Peter Heywood, Tamora James, Twin Karmakharm, Matthew Leach & Neil Shephard
1 November 2026
The cost of creating lines of code is dropping. Everybody, with the help of a few prompts, can produce thousands and thousands of lines of code. This is also the case for words, and the cost of creating text is also falling dramatically. As we have recently seen, conference registered abstracts are skyrocketing (ICLR Went From 490 registered abstract to 62,000 in Ten Years1) and we start to see research papers made by people claiming openly that they did not and were not able to verify their content2.
“A sub-Earth-sized TESS planet candidate in the nearby M-dwarf binary GJ 774, most likely orbiting GJ 774 A (TIC 351339274”. Quote from the author: “The author has not independently checked the analyses and does not have the expertise to verify every technical detail; the work relies instead on the validation steps listed below and on the public release of all code and data, so that others can check it.” It is worth noting that the paper has since been withdrawn from arXiv. ↩