Published 12th December 2025, interviewed September 2024

Can you tell be a bit about your role?

I’m a senior research infrastructure engineer at the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee. I’ve been there roughly three years now. I mostly spend my time working on trusted research environments in the cloud (AWS), doing a lot of development, helping to run them, and then helping to look at the future of them. I’m also involved in the UK Trusted Research Environment (TRE) community, which is effectively a spin-off of an RSE satellite meeting three years ago in Newcastle. And we now have maybe three hundred members on the mailing list.

How did you become an Research Infrastructure Engineer?

I did a PhD in an interdisciplinary area after working in the private sector for two years. So though my training was in engineering and computing, I did a PhD in a mix of cell biology and image analysis. I really enjoyed working with researchers in an interdisciplinary manner. Then I moved up to Dundee, worked with the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) for quite a long time, working on open source software. Initially, I was just an application developer, but I got more interested in the infrastructure side of things. And now I’m really interested in looking at the whole crossover. You know, how you go from the idea of some embryonic research project to developing software, getting it to production and running it as a large scale production service. I subsequently moved to the Health Informatics Centre.

RSEing basically picked me, because as I say, I started off just doing some computing, dabbled in some cell biology for a bit, went back to application development, took an interest in infrastructure, and now I’m just interested in a bit of everything. And I think that just fits the definition of RSE really well.

When did you first hear the term “RSE”?

Probably between 2018 and 2019. It would have been on the mailing list, or just passing me by somewhere.

What is your favourite thing about your work and being an RSE?

As I said earlier, it is the ability to see the full research path. Well, almost the full research life cycle for software – where you come up with the original idea, try it out, try and productionise it, deploy it as a public service, and actually see hundreds, maybe even thousands of people using it, and you know you are helping other researchers.

When I was working for the Open Microscopy Environment, I worked with something called the Image Data Resource. It was based on OMERO which is an open source image management platform for the life sciences.  It had been around for quite a while, but we worked with the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) to really scale it up. That was back in maybe 2014, 2015. And at the time, no one had really done anything like that before. So we had probably 50 terabytes of imaging data. And we made it open access online with a web browser, you could go and zoom into it. Just think about it, trying to make 50 terabytes of imaging data available in 2014. It was not something that anyone had ever really done before.

It probably hasn’t changed as much as you’d think in the last 10 years. When I left the OME to start working on TREs back in about 2020, they were developing a new sort of cloud-native file format called Zarr (there was actually a presentation about it, yesterday). But the thing is, in the life sciences, especially because you’re using microscopes or proprietary imaging tools, it can be very slow to bring in new file formats. And it takes a lot of pressure and political skill for researchers to push commercial companies to support them.

And what is the least favourite?

So I think one of the main complaints is that there’s a lack of training for researchers in good software development or good analytical practice with data management. And as a result, I find I spend a lot of time answering fairly basic questions, which is fine because you have to teach researchers, they won’t always learn by themselves. But I feel like there should be more structured training for that.

What’s the most unexpected part about being a RSE?

This is a difficult question. Given my awareness of RSE came from Sheffield where the RSE group grew out of, and is still located within the school (formerly department) of computer science. I’ve become aware that Sheffield RSE is somewhat of an outlier, most are located within their equivalent of IT services or ResearchIT. We do have a partner team in our ResearchIT, “data analytics service”, that was founded after our team. They are essentially a team of RSEs and data scientists with a slightly different funding model, that instead sit on professional services contracts. We often work closely with them, but remain distinct groups despite whatever confusion that may cause.

How would you suggest the RSE community improve its outreach to reach people who are not in that traditional pathway, and maybe get them to enter the RSE community?

I’m trying to think about how I came to the RSE community, but I definitely didn’t think of myself as an RSE. I just happened to be doing that sort of work. And I know in Scotland, there are lots of people doing RSE-style work who aren’t really part of this community.

Ultimately, if we’re trying to build a community, you find things that are compelling to them. So just saying “we’ve got RSEs doing this, people doing the sorts of things you do” that’s just another thing to add to the list of a thousand other things you’re going to do at some point. So I don’t know what the answer is. But if you can find something that’s really compelling, that really draws people in, and makes someone come to an online session. But I don’t have an answer for what that is.

What is the most unexpected part about working in RSE?

Probably just the variety of people you end up meeting. Academia can be a bit of a closed world sometimes. But then when you go to conferences, you just talk to people more casually, you realise that there are lots of people working in industry, in crossover areas, in completely different sectors. For instance, there may be scientists pleased to hear that there are loads of RSEs in the humanities. 

Do you see yourself as an academic, researcher, software engineer, technician…? All of it? Something else? A mix of one or two terms?

I’d say probably half software engineer, half infrastructure engineer, but I also feel to a certain extent I’m all of those, and that’s what I really enjoy.

What do you see as your most likely future career path from here? And what would be your ideal career path?

Very good question, so I actually had my annual appraisal about a month ago where I was trying to think about this. And I’m in two minds. So on one hand there are the goals, what do you want to achieve, and then what is the typical pathway, the typical way to get there, which would then be taking more of a potential leadership role, having more impact and influence, based on what I do. The other approach is an almost casual approach. Do we have to follow the well-defined pathways where we become a manager, become a leader? Or is there a way to do some of those sorts of tasks, but without following those formal structures?

In Dundee, we don’t really have many formal RSEs. We have a lot of people doing RSE-style work, so they’ll be at a certain grade. Beyond that, you’ve then expected to be some sort of group leader, or team leader.

I think one challenge is that a lot of what I’m doing ends up being tied to particular grants, not all of it, but a lot of it is. So then, I think your ability to progress really depends on what grant opportunities come up. For example, could you be a Co-PI (Co-Principal Investigator) in one of those grants?

In your view, how could RSEs be better supported in their work? What do you need? What is missing?

As I said earlier the thing I dislike the most is the lack of support for researchers that you’re working with to gain the skills they need. That’s part of being an RSE, but I also think a lot of the skills should really be taught at a much more fundamental level. So now, in Dundee, they started teaching e.g. biologists about basic coding practices, which is obviously really good. And I think there’s a lot of scope for  bringing in  more things like open science, open data, open access, best practices and why should you consider them. I had a conversation in the pub last night with someone, and one of the things that came up was a public understanding of impact. Most researchers face barriers in how they can do their work. They might, because of data protection rules, not be able to get data or if they can, there’s loads of restrictions on what they can do with the data. And I think there’s room for some sort of research training on why this matters. Because, as a researcher, sometimes you can be very divorced from the public, even though the data might ultimately come from the public or have a public impact. Talking about research impacts, it’s the same as with data management plans, it’s something you have to do as part of writing a grant. And I would like to look at some programs to make it more understandable for RSEs and researchers, just to make it clear why this matters at a more personal level.

What advice do you have to individuals looking to start a career in Research Software Engineering?

So, there are a few different schools of thought. My view is that it’s beneficial to go in either as a researcher or as a software engineer or some other technical role, get some reasonable experience in that and then start expanding the role to become an RSE. I know the alternative view for some people is that you should be an RSE from the very beginning. I can see the benefits of that. I do think there’s value in both approaches.

Ultimately, you’re helping researchers. It’s very difficult to do that if you haven’t actually been a researcher and had to deal with gathering real data. As an RSE, you might ask why are you analysing this data that looks wrong? You’ve got numbers missing. But there’ll be a good reason for it.

Because I did a bit of life cell biology, I realised that when your images look rubbish, there’s a reason. And it’s not the researcher’s fault. It’s just because the organism you were imaging just decided it didn’t want to be imaged. And a cell, in a dish, decided to die or whatever. And that’s just not under your control.