A World-Wide Movement to Improve the Recognition of Research Software

Speaker: Dr. Sandra Gesing

Abstract: Software has become a major driver for research with over 90% of researchers answering surveys that they use software for their research and over 65% expressing that they even could not do their research without software. In the last 15 years Python has evolved to a majorly used programming language in academia and at national labs. Thus, a plethora of libraries and packages have been developed enabling significant discoveries such as the gravitational waves from colliding black holes and the analyses of DNA from Next-Generation Sequencing technologies. While these discoveries are recognized world-wide for their importance, the required software or the people creating and maintaining the software to achieve them, rarely get the same recognition. The UK Software Sustainability Institute coined the term Research Software Engineer in 2013 and started the UK RSE association with expressive success in the UK. Other countries and/or continents followed such as The Netherlands, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, since 2018 the US and just this year Africa, to name a few.

US-RSE (US Research Software Engineers Association) is working on achieving a cultural change in academia in the US to increase incentives for people being in this line of work and adapt the typical traditional academic value system with bringing in funding and publication of manuscripts. The Python community has much overlap with the RSE community and is vibrant evident in the SciPy conference and the PyData community. This talk will go into detail for concrete activities such the Python group in the US-RSE Slack channel, opportunities to connect via Birds of a Feather sessions (BOFs) and conferences such as SciPy, workshops for career development for RSEs and data scientists and regional working groups for building community that could complement activities of the PyData community, for example.

Speaker Biography: I am a senior research scientist at the Discovery Partner Institute (DPI) at the University of Illinois System. My research focuses on science gateways, computational workflows as well as distributed and parallel computing which inherently leads to highly interdisciplinary projects. I am especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods and reproducibility of research results and I support open science initiatives, i.e., I am an academic editor of PeerJ Computer Science and Frontiers. Sustainability of research software has many facets and I advocate for improving career paths for research software engineers and facilitators and for incentivizing their work via means beyond the traditional academic rewarding system. Community outreach and interdisciplinary events are crucial to contribute to changing academic culture.

Prior to the position at DPI, I was an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist in the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before I moved to the US, I was a research associate in the Data-Intensive Research Group at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in the area of data-intensive workflows and in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in the area of science gateways and grid computing. Additionally, I have perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry in the US and Germany. As head of a system programmer group, I have led long-term software projects (e.g. infrastructure on web-based applications). I received my German diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and my PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.