March 2026 Newsletter
Welcome to our March Newsletter. This month, we’re bringing you news about this year’s conference, some other events and requests for help from the Society’s special interest groups, plus some updates from the wider RSE Community.
Let’s dive in!
Headlines
We’ve got some exciting updates on RSECon26, an upcoming event for RSE Leaders and Aspiring Leaders being organised by some of the Society’s working groups, and the Green RSE special interest group has a favour to ask.
RSECon26 Calls are Open!
We’re celebrating 10 years of the UK RSE Conference in Sheffield in September. The conference will run from 9 – 11 September 2026, and will be co-located with the first International Research Software Conference, being organised by our friends at the Research Software Alliance.
The call for submissions (including talks, posters and workshops) is now open, along with calls for reviewers, volunteers and papers for the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS).
- More information about all of the calls can be found on the conference website.
RSE Leaders & Aspiring Leaders: Funding landscape for RSEs – 15 June – Registration Open
We invite you to join us for the next RSE Leaders & Aspiring Leaders meeting, which will focus on the policy and funding landscape for RSEs. The Society has recently launched a Policy & Funding Working Group to help the Society better advocate for RSEs with institutions, funders, and policy makers. Attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to the Working Group’s strategy and help shape the key advocacy areas that the Society will focus on in the coming years.
- Registration by Monday 11th May
- When: 15th June, 11.00-17.00
- Where: Durham University – or online (indicate when you register, we will share joining instructions prior to the event)
- Hosts: Durham University Advanced Research Computing, SocRSE’s Policy & Funding Working Group, RSE Leaders Network SIG
If you wish to attend any of the other sessions of Durham HPC Days (15-19 June), you will need to register separately.
Green RSE – Job Descriptions
The Green RSE Special Interest Group is looking to collect examples of RSE job descriptions that include some element of environmental sustainability. These don’t have to be “Green RSE” jobs, just job descriptions that have something environmental in them (e.g. profiling, purchasing, tracking, or energy-efficient coding practices). Even a single bullet point in the responsibilities or desirable skills section counts!
If your organisation has hired, or is currently hiring, for an RSE role that has any element of environmental sustainability, please share them with Kirsty Pringle: [email protected].
Ultimately, we’d like to use this information (and input from other projects) to make a “green” section in e.g. the RSE repo of job templates in some way, and help define possible green RSE roles. Many thanks!
Feedback Event
On 10th March, we held a feedback event, where members of the community could get updates from the trustees on Society activities, and contribute to conversations about the future of the research software community. Our main updates were on our CoARA Action plan and sharing the results of the recent vote on the Society’s Ethical Sponsorship Policy, but we also had a series of breakout rooms so that members of the community could discuss various aspects of the Society’s activities with the trustees.
- You can read a summary of the announcements and discussions in this blog post.
Community News & Events
This month, we’ve got some updates on a couple of events from our friends at Nordic-RSE and HDR UK.
Save the Date: Nordic-RSE Conference 2026 in Tromsø (June 9-10)
Come join us at the Nordic Research Software Engineering Conference 2026, taking place in Tromsø, Norway, on June 9-10, 2026. This event will bring together research software engineers, researchers, and professionals working at the interface of research and digital technologies to share knowledge, foster collaboration, and explore new ideas.
We are pleased to announce two keynote speakers:
- Dr Mihaela Duta, Principal Research Software Engineer at the University of Oxford
- Assoc. Prof. Dr Elisabeth Wetzer, Associate Professor in Machine Learning at UiT
The call for abstracts is now open, with a submission deadline of April 27, 2026.
Registration is also open, with a deadline of May 24, 2026.
- For more details and the full programme, visit: https://nordic-rse.org/nrse2026/
We look forward to welcoming you to Tromsø!
Distributed Computing for Health Data Research Workshop
HDR UK are running a live, online workshop on distributed computing on Tuesday 19 May.
This full-day workshop offers a hands-on introduction to common big data tools, such as Hadoop, Spark, and Kafka, applied to stored (batch) and real-time (streaming) processing of healthcare data. The first half will introduce Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and distributed (cloud) storage systems, along with Spark libraries for machine learning prediction and classification problems. The second half will concentrate on real-time processing in Kafka, based on synthetic data generation and interactive analytical dashboards. A drop-in session will be held after the workshop sessions to address technical questions. The focus of the workshop is how to orchestrate big data pipelines by combining different tools and libraries, rather than on interpreting results.
Spaces still remain, so follow the link to secure your place. A range of discounted spaces are available for members of the HDR UK community. Get in touch with us at [email protected] to enquire about discounts.
Society Updates
And finally, our regular reminder that we have a number of events, initiatives and resources that you might want to check out. These are linked below.
| Special Interest Groups | We have eight Special Interest Groups being run by our community members, and supported by the Society. Check out our SIGs page to get involved (or start your own!). |
| Events and Initiatives Fund | The Society has Events and Initiatives funding to provide support for events and initiatives which support our mission statement and charitable objectives. |
| Membership | Not yet a member? Why not join us today? We welcome anyone who supports our mission, whether or not they are employed as RSEs. |
| Jobs | A reminder that if you are looking for RSE-related jobs, you can join the #jobs channel on the RSE Slack workspace or visit our vacancies page. |
| Zenodo | We have a Community Zenodo Account for RSEs in the community to share publications about RSE. |
| Podcasts | Code for Thought is back and now in its ninth season, with episodes now in English, German and French. It is available on all major podcast directories, including YouTube. |
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