Why work with us?

The Research Software Engineering (RSE) team at the University of Sheffield strives to:

• Enhance the University’s capacity for producing high quality, efficient and sustainable research software and thus increasing research impact and decreasing time to publication.
• Provide a range of research software engineering services via a pool of staff to support research grants, thereby increasing the capability of research units and helping to meet the requirements and expectations of funders.
• Champion the role of the RSE locally, nationally and internationally and to support the career development of RSE professionals.
• Act as the hub of a university community that supports good practice in research software.

The RSE team can collaborate with you to help improve your research software. We have a pool of expert staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects (see example projects and testimonials). Supporting the entire University, we have collaborators in every faculty and have supported researchers in a range of subject areas including engineering, mathematics, computer science, biology, linguistics, physics, chemistry and geography.

Please contact us (rse@sheffield.ac.uk) to arrange a scoping meeting.

Why work with the RSE Team

The RSE Team allows you to get dedicated help for professional software engineers. Recruitment of such skills is very difficult on research projects, especially when you only require short term expertise. UKRI (and most other UK and EU funding agencies) understand what an import part RSEs have on research and would like to see that they are being offered sustainable careers with academia. The RSE Team provides this through underwritten roles and by allowing RSEs to work to a unique job description. If you want to deliver software engineering as part of your grant application then there is a good chance that you will be required to demonstrate how this will be done sustainability. The RSE Team is an excellent way to provide this evidence to your funders.

Collaborative research software development

The aim of the RSE team is to provide staff to support software engineering for research. This is always done as a collaborative exercise. In most cases where an RSE is required, the novel research is facilitated by software and the RSE rather than the development of software being novel in its own right.

If you wish to undertake a collaborative software engineering project where the focus is on novel software engineering research then this can be provided by our director or academics associated with the RSE team. As part of this you may also cost RSE time. The RSE director for example, holds an academic position in the Department of Computer Science and delivers collaborative research around novel high-performance computing.