The month of September was an eventful one for the RSE community. The Society of Research Software Engineering (RSE) hosted yet another successful RSE Conference (RSECon25) at the University of Warwick, Coventry and online, bringing together RSEs from across the UK and beyond to share knowledge, network, and celebrate the vital role of research software in advancing science. The conference season did not end there, almost immediately after RSECon25, members of the international RSE community hosted the Research Software Asia Australia (RSAA25) conference, with a focus on fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange among RSEs in the Asia-Pacific region.
In this edition of the newsletter, we include highlights from the conferences, upcoming events, and opportunities for engagement.
The Festival of Hidden REF is taking place on 7th and 8th October 2025 which will bring together people who work with non-traditional outputs and in Hidden Roles with policymakers, publishers and others involved in research assessment. Register if you would like to attend.
On 22nd October 2025 14:00-16:00, Imperial’s Research Software Engineering community will be hosting Open-Source Jam, a hands-on in-person event for MSc students, PhD researchers, and postdoctoral staff who want to take their first steps into open-source contributions. The event will be free but registration is required.
deRSE26 - the Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany will take place from the 3rd to the 5th March 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany. The call for contributions is now open and closes on Sunday 26th October 2025.
Hui Ling Wong will be hosting “Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Seminars: Autumn 2025” at the Department of Aeronautics, as a part of her SSI fellowship. The seminars will be held on every Tuesday from 14th October to 11th November 2025. Further details of the seminars can be found here.
The DRIFT project will be running a dRTP training hackathon event hosted at the University of Cambridge on Friday 7th November 2025. Join us to contribute to the open source Gutenberg training platform or to work on a variety of other training-related activities. Event registration is open and a full schedule will be released soon.
The new, UKRI-funded Collaborative Computational Project for Arts, Humanities, and Culture (CCP-AHC) will hold a series of regional engagement events in October and November 2025. As part of this series, a London event will take place on Friday 14th November 2025, 12.30-16:00. Further details and registration.
This year’s Research Software Camp (RSC) will run for two weeks from 10th to 21st November 2025. The sessions will centre around the theme of Careers and Skills in Research Software. The tickets are free-of-charge, with registration opening on 6th October 2025. Save the date and keep an eye on the RSC website for more details.
Collaborations Workshop 2026 (CW26) will take place as a hybrid event from 28th to 30th April 2026 at ICC Belfast, and will centre around one powerful theme and clear purpose: Strengthening the Research Software Community. Registration is now open.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Dr Miruna Serian:
I joined the RSE team in August 2025 as a Research Software Engineer, after completing my PhD in Computational Biophysics at King’s College London through the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme (LIDo). My research focused on using molecular dynamics simulations and unsupervised learning to study the behaviour and synergy of antimicrobial peptides, exploring their potential as alternatives to traditional antibiotics.
I began my software journey with an MSc in Bioinformatics, followed by a role in industry at a hedge fund technology start-up in London, before returning to academia for my PhD. During my PhD studies, I also had the opportunity to intern in the pharmaceutical industry, where I built computational workflows to improve the early screening of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. Through these experiences, I realised that I enjoy building the tools that help accelerate research, and I came to appreciate the importance of good software and how it can improve reproducibility, streamline workflows, and make complex methods more accessible to researchers.
Outside of work, I am interested in building inclusive and supportive tech communities. I have led two Google Developer Student Clubs and currently serve as an Ambassador for Women Techmakers, where I support initiatives that promote diversity and accessibility in technology. I am excited to be part of the research software community and look forward to contributing to exciting projects that power cutting-edge research.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is PyProBE from Thomas Holland, a PhD student in the MechEng department, working on batteries:
PyProBE (Python Processing for Battery Experiments) is a Python package for processing experimental cycling data for lithium-ion batteries. Understanding how batteries perform and degrade involves long experiments over weeks, months and sometimes years. These experiments involve extended repeated charging and discharging of the battery cell for a program of interest, interrupted at regular intervals by Reference Performance Tests (RPTs).
These RPTs often follow a set of common design patterns, which make the data processing task a good candidate for standardisation. However, it is common for researchers to write custom post-processing scripts for their experiments. This code is very rarely shared between researchers or in publications, making analysis difficult to reproduce and wasting researchers’ time re-writing common methods.
PyProBE addresses these challenges in a number of ways. Its core is a user friendly API for extracting certain segments of data. This uses polars lazyframes behind-the-scenes, so that only the requested data (likely to be a very small subset of the total time-series) needs to be loaded into memory. The parquet file format is perfect for accessing columnar data in this way quickly. PyProBE converts data provided by the user into a standard parquet file format from a number of custom formats used by battery cycling equipment manufacturers. Finally, PyProBE includes a number of functions for common analysis methods. In an open-source package, this allows methods to be reviewed and compared by the community.
PyProBE is published in JOSS and distributed on pypi as PyProBE-Data.
The STEP-UP project has launched a new mentoring scheme for digital Research Techincal Professionals (dRTPs). The project team are currently looking for people who would be willing to act as mentors as part of this scheme and for people looking for mentoring to provide support in their journey as either a new or experienced dRTP. The scheme is open to anyone currently working as a research software, research data or research computing infrastructure/HPC professional, or looking to develop a career in one of these areas. It’s also open to researchers/PhD students who are undertaking work in these areas. Take a look at the mentoring scheme page on the STEP-UP website for more information or to sign up.
In an exciting development for the international research software community, at the close of this year’s RSECon, it was announced that in 2026, a new International Research Software Conference (IRSC) will join the annual calendar of RSE events. The 2026 event will take place on the 7th and 8th September 2026, co-located with RSECon26 in Sheffield, UK. Look our for more details of the event over the coming months.
Interested in learning more about how to effectively recognise, reward, and support all those who make contributions to research software? Check out the recent blog post from the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI), “Telling Our Success Stories: Recognising Contributions in Research Software”.
CompileBench is a fascinating new open source benchmark for LLMs, looking at their ability to build code and handle things like dependency issues and a range of other challenges with real open source projects. Take a look at the blog post “CompileBench: Can AI Compile 22-year-old Code?”.
For anyone working in the energy research field, a recently published paper at E-Energy ‘25 looks at “Ten Recommendations for Engineering Research Software in Energy Research”.
If you write Java code and you have projects you want to update, a recent blog post on the GitHub blog highlights how GitHub Copilot “agent mode” can help you undertaking this work within VSCode.
Another blog post by the SSI community, “Code That Works Isn’t Always Code That Lasts” talks about which steps can improve future maintenance and usability of research software for both the original author and any researcher who inherits it.
Discover the story behind one of the world’s most popular programming languages: watch Python: The Documentary - An origin story. After watching the documentary, you can dive deeper into the story with the EuroPython Q&A about the documentary.
In a recent episode of Code For Thought, Peter Schmidt spoke with three of the 2025 SSI Fellows about their motivations, research interests, and what they hope to achieve through the SSI Fellowship Programme.
The Imperial Research Software Community Slack workspace is a place for general community discussion as well as featuring channels for individuals interested in particular tools or topics. If you’re an OpenFOAM user, why not join the #OpenFOAM channel where regular code review sessions are announced (amongst other CFD-related discussions…). Users of the Nextflow workflow tool can find other Imperial Nextflow users in #nextflow. You can find other R developers in #r-users and there is the #DeepLearners channel for AI/ML-related questions and discussion. Take a look at the other available channels by clicking the “+” next to “Channels” in the Slack app and selecting “Browse channels”.
If you want to start your own group around a tool, programming language or topic not currently represented, feel free to create a new channel and advertise it in #general.
If you need support with your code, seek no more! The Central RSE Team, within the Research Computing Service is here to help. Have a look at the variety of ways the team can work with you:
All the documentation, tutorials and howtos for using Imperial’s HPC are available in the Imperial RCS User Guide.
Imperial’s Research Software Directory provides details of a range of research software and tools developed by groups and individuals at the College. If you’d like to see your software included in the directory, you can open a pull request in the GitHub repository or get in touch with the Research Software Community Committee.
Drop us a line with anything you’d like included in the newsletter, ideas about how it could be improved, or even offer to guest-edit a future edition! rse-committee@imperial.ac.uk.
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This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.