June 2025 Newsletter

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter June 2025

Welcome to the June 2025 newsletter for the research software community at The University of Sheffield, featuring news, opportunities, events and training for you.

News

• RSE Call for Proposals 2025 is now open.
  • To support the One University vision and the University research community we are pleased to announce for the second consecutive year the 2025 RSE collaboration call for proposals. This initiative aims to facilitate access to RSE expertise for researchers who require assistance with software development, optimization, or other computational challenges.
  • For this round we will select two projects that will receive 6 months @ 50% FTE of free RSE collaboration.
  • We received 26 submissions to last year’s call, you can read a summary of the proposals on our blog.
  • Closing date for applications is 28th June 2025.

Events

Upcoming Local Events

• Tidying and manipulating data using the tidyverse in R: a workshop for data stewards - 6th June 2025
  • This one-day course will cover essential data wrangling skills in R using the tidyverse (dplyr, tidyr, stringr, etc.).
  • Find out more and register to attend here
• AI in Health Showcase - 16th June 2025
  • A joint showcase event hosted by the Centre for Machine Intelligence (CMI), Insigneo, and the NIHR Sheffield Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).
  • Find out more and register to attend here - Closes: 11th June 2025
• Data management with SQL: a workshop for data stewards - 17th June 2025
  • A practical, in-person workshop to teach the basics of SQL databases for handling research data.
  • Find out more and register to attend here

Upcoming External Events

• STEP-UP RSLondon Conference 2025: The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London - 7th July 2025

• N8CIR RSE Meet-Up: University of York - 10th July 2025

• RSECon25: University of Warwick, Coventry - 9-11th September 2025
  • Registration now open - Closes: 31st July 2025
  • Applications for bursaries to attend are also open - Closes: 6th July 2025

• Research Software Asia Australia Conference (RSAA25): Online - 17-19th September 2025

• Open Data Camp 10: University of Edinburgh Business School - 27-28th September 2025

• The Festival of Hidden REF: Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum - 7-8th October 2025
  • Tickets are now available

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Blogs/Podcasts

• The Software Engineering Identity Crisis

• The Prospects of DAHRSEs in the Midlands for AHRC Doctoral Landscape Awards

• The Hidden REF has launched a podcast - Available on YouTube, RSS Feed and other podcast platforms

Opportunities

• DARE UK next-generation trusted research environment capabilities - Closes: 5th June 2025

• Call for Flexible Fund reviewers: Join our Opportunity Review Panel - Closes: 6th June 2025

• Feedback being requested on the draft of the new UKRI data policy (including code and software) and webinar - Closes: 9th July 2025

• Nominations for Trustees of the Society of Research Software Engineering are now open - Closes: 24th June 2025

• The Society of Research Software Engineering has funding available to support various community events and initiatives - available now

Training

For more forthcoming RSE training events, keep an eye on our Training page and join our mailing list to hear about new events.

Jobs

Check for advertised RSE and RSE-adjacent roles at the RSE society’s vacancies board.

Community

Digital Research Practice Support Community

The DRPS community is a group for people that support researchers in carrying out research in the digital age. Meetings are held monthly, with discussions around events, training and opportunities related to the field. You can join the google group to stay informed. Next meeting: Wednesday 18th June 2025 at 2pm.

LunchBytes

LunchBytes are short talks from the research community on research software, data, and infrastructure.

More information on future LunchBytes will be coming out over the coming months, so sign up to the RSE mailing list if you’d like to learn more about research software and associated practices, or get in contact with Farhad if you would like to share what you know at an upcoming session!

Support

Code Clinics

Why not come to a Code Clinic? We’re keen to help you.

Code Clinics are fortnightly supported sessions run by the RSE team and IT Services’ Research IT team. They are open to anyone at TUoS writing code for research to get help with programming problems and general advice on best practices.

At each session, members of the RSE and/or Research IT teams will be available to review code, advise, troubleshoot, and suggest ways to improve your computational workflows.

Research IT HPC Drop In

HPC Drop-In sessions are providing assistance with HPC related user issues such as challenges in scaling an application from desktop to supercomputer. We are considering extending the number of our sessions to two or three weekly. These interactive sessions could provide a better interface with our users than our non-interactive ticketing system. These sessions are advertised on the HPC mailing list.

Research IT Consultations

Alongside the HPC Drop-In sessions, Research IT are also running one to one consultations to solve in depth user specific problems. These consultations can be booked via our webpage. If you are interested please visit the following link: https://students.sheffield.ac.uk/it-services/research.

Sheffield RSE Team

The Sheffield RSE Team aims to collaborate with you to help improve your research software. They can provide dedicated staff to ensure that you can deliver excellent research software engineering on your research projects.

Research IT

Research IT directly supports research, both academic and commercial. We provide large scale HPC systems, advice on everything from statistics to ML to data pipelines and training for both students and staff.

Working with academics, our staff are embedded within research groups on both long and short term engagements.