Sheffield RSE travelled to RSECon25

A few weeks ago, the Research Software Engineering (RSE) community gathered at the University of Warwick for RSECon25 (9–11 September 2025). The conference brought together hundreds of RSEs, researchers, and collaborators to share their work on software, best practices, exchange ideas, and build the future of research software.

From left to right: Yuliang Weng, Martin Dyer, Daniel Brady, Michael Foster, Romain Thomas, Peter Heywood, Shaun Donnelly, Erika Siregar (PhD from the information School), Christopher Wild, Gemma Ives, Tamora James, Edwin Brown, Neil Shephard, Farhad Allian, Robert Chisholm,Matthew Leach, Joe Heffer, Twin Karmakharm, Paul Richmond

The University of Sheffield RSEs played a major role in this year’s event — not only as a Silver Sponsor, but also through leadership positions, presentations, posters, workshops, and volunteering. Our team’s involvement demonstrates Sheffield’s strong commitment to the RSE community.

Several Sheffield RSEs took on key leadership roles in shaping RSECon25:

• Twin Karmakharm – Steering Committee Chair
• Romain Thomas – Programme Co-chair
• Robert Chisholm – Logistics Co-chair
• Neil Shephard – Publicity Chair

These roles highlight the influence and responsibility our team have in driving the direction and success of the national RSE conference.

In addition, Sheffield’s RSE team was present across the programme, with contributions spanning talks, posters, walkthroughs, and workshops:

• Talks & Walkthrough:
  • Matthew Leach – AMD GPUs for Scientific Computing
  • Shaun Donnelly & Edwin Brown – How to talk to your documents: An introduction to using natural language to query documents with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Romain Thomas & Neil Shephard – Running a local RSE call for proposals
• Workshops:
  • Robert Chisholm & Peter Heywood – Reasonable Performance Computing SIG (SIG-RPC): Help Identify and Document Performance Traps in Research Software
• Posters:
  • Tamora James & Romain Thomas - FAIR2 for research software: developing a FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and reproducible research software training programme
  • Edwin Brown - AutoEmulate:  Python library for automatically creating accurate and efficient emulators of complex simulations
  • Dan Brady - Leveraging GitHub API Data to Evaluate Git and GitHub Training Outcomes
  • Martin Dyer - Developing the GOTO Telescope Control System

This broad and diverse participation reflects the strength of our team across technical expertise, training, and community support.

Sheffield colleagues also supported the smooth running of the conference through volunteering (Daniel Brady & Michael Foster) and session chairing (Paul Richmond & Joe Heffer from the DAS team).

Looking towards RSECon26

We are excited to announce that the University of Sheffield will host RSECon26 in 2026 at the wave (9-11th September), which will also be co-located with the first International Research Software Conference (IRSC) (7-8th September). Building on our contributions at Warwick, we look forward to welcoming the RSE community to Sheffield next year for another vibrant and impactful conference. Romain Thomas and Twin Karmakharm will be leading the conference as programme chairs.

• Credit Photo: RSE Society