July 2025 Newsletter

8 July 2025 13:00

The University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering Community Newsletter July 2025

Welcome to the July 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 closed.
    • We received 35 proposals (9 more than last year). We will be reviewing these over the next few weeks and will announce the results soon.

Surveys/Questionnaires

  • Survey on technical role titles in health data science
    • Do you work in a technical capacity in health data science? The HDR UK Technician Commitment Working Group has designed a survey to better understand the technical community’s preferences regarding the terminology used to describe technical roles in health data science. The aim of the survey is to build an evidence base that can guide our future use of terminology and ensure it aligns with the community’s views. Thank you very much in advance for your feedback.
  • Generative AI in the workplace
    • The Academic Data Science Alliance, US Research Software Engineer Association, and Schmidt Sciences are working together to uncover how Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and those in adjacent workspaces (e.g., research team members, data scientists) are using Generative AI in the workplace. The goals of this survey are to capture broad “state of the field” information and to help define topic areas for a set of convenings with the RSE community over the coming year.

Events

Upcoming Local Events

  • European Defense Tech Hackathon - 18th July in Sheffield
  • DAFNI Annual Conference - 11th September at The Edge
    • The theme of the 2025 conference is “Bridging the gap between Academia, Government and Industry”, including the sub-themes Climate Resilience and Security and Trusted Research.
  • Beyond the research article: understanding Sheffield’s non-traditional research outputs
    • Focus group participants are needed for a project exploring how researchers define and share non-traditional research outputs across disciplines at the University of Sheffield - receive a £25 Love2Shop voucher for your time.
    • Focus groups will be held online 10am-11.30am on Wednesday 9 July and Thursday 10 July. If you are interested in participating, please complete this form . If you have any questions about the project, please contact Dr Holly Ranger or Dr Lesley Uttley.

Upcoming External Events

Articles, Blogs, Papers & Podcasts

Podcasts

Blogs

Opportunities

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 16th July 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.

Blog Home

Contact Us

For queries relating to collaborating with the RSE team on projects: rse@sheffield.ac.uk

Information and access to Bede.

Join our mailing list so as to be notified when we advertise talks and workshops by subscribing to this Google Group.

Queries regarding free research computing support/guidance should be raised via our Code clinic or directed to the University IT helpdesk.