Published 9th May 2025
What is your current role?
I’m the Executive Director of the US Research Software Engineers Association1 for half of my time, and I spend the other half as a senior researcher with the San Diego Supercomputer Center2.
How did you become an RSE?
I started with an apprenticeship in Germany after high school, already being a programmer and then I worked for 13 years in industry and also as a group lead of a systems programming group. Then I came to academia where I’ve been for over 15 years, mostly creating software and I did my PhD in a bioinformatics group. If the title existed, then I would have been called a Research Software Engineer doing my PhD at the same time.
So you’ve had a full academic experience then. When did you first hear the term RSE because as you said it wasn’t a thing when you were first doing it?
I heard about it in 2013, I knew Neil already for years from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI)3 and through the collaborations workshop. That year I moved to the US but I was at the University of Edinburgh then.
What is your favourite thing about your work and being an RSE?
So my favorite thing is building the community. I’m still really happy to implement, I’m not implementing much software anymore in my role, but I can help other people to find their career path. In the UK, it’s already much further in having a career path for Research Software Engineers. The US has to catch up on that and it starts slowly as it’s a big country, I know it’s not consistent across the UK but that’s the impression I get. There are already a couple of universities who are getting there and I know from my own experience that training material is important, that community is important, that the support from the institutions is important.
A lot of the RSE teams in the UK began with EPSRC RSE fellowships, is there any equivalent funding available that’s helped?
Not at the moment, so we hope that we can get in that direction with the next funding. In 2018, we started really being more active after the first RSE leaders meeting here in the UK where international leaders were coming and then we really working on awareness and then more and more people are like “oh yeah we need that”. The fellowships are definitely something that is on our list but probably we won’t be able to start it in the next year. We need different funding for that.
What’s your least favorite thing about your work as an RSE?
This hasn’t happened to me but when researchers don’t take you seriously, but think oh you know you are just creating the software. I’m lucky with my background of having been in research faculty and still being a senior researcher myself I come with a different standing. I don’t mind being called an engineer instead of a researcher though it’s when people have a fixed view of it just being software. For example a researcher was very against adding the Research Software Engineers to a paper as co-authors even though they wrote the software and asked them also to write a paragraph about the software.
What’s the most unexpected part about being an RSE?
It’s really exciting that you can be part of several different research projects. I was part of a malaria project as different next-gen sequencing projects and disease modelling. I’ve also worked on Physics projects which I expected to be great fun, but it turned out even more interesting.
How do you see yourself, as an academic researcher, software engineer, technician or all of the above?
Probably all, almost everything on that list because I’m still a senior researcher in cyber infrastructure and research computing. I don’t do a lot of individual contributor work anymore, but being the executive director, I get to advocate for RSEs.
In your view how could RSEs be better supported in their work, what do they need, what is missing?
I think training and having really good resources for what they need but in the work but that totally depends on the institution. I think often it’s really giving them the time to do the training.
What advice do you have for individuals looking to start a career in Research Software Engineering?
I think it’s worth reaching out to senior leaders, research organisations and nearby groups. Discussing what kind of options are in terms of how much research or software is the focus. Some universities already have teams and internships you can start with getting a feel for things. You may have institutions where you are embedded within a research project and do that alongside the software, or others which are central groups.