With the holidays approaching, our December newsletter comes to you a little earlier in the month than usual, but with the usual mix of content that we hope you’ll find interesting and useful as we head into 2026. This month’s newsletter also represents another impressive milestone for Imperial’s Research Software Community, completing our seventh year of monthly newsletters! 🎉 I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to all the members of our Research Software Community committee over the last few years who have contributed their time to write, edit and review newsletters each month to make this possible. There are lots of conferences and events coming up in the new year and several of the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) NetworkPlus projects will be launching calls in 2026 for access to their flexible funds. Aside from offering a chance to apply for funding to support a range of DRI and research software-related activities, if you’re looking to gain experience reviewing proposals, the NetworkPlus flexible funds also represent a great opportunity. Many projects are launching calls for reviewers alongside their funding calls. Keep an eye out for opportunities over the coming months and we’ll aim to highlight as many of these as possible to you in future editions of this newsletter. The Research Software Community committee wish everyone in our community a good break and all the very best for the holidays and 2026.
The UK Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy will be hosting an online session on Careers in Research Software Engineering as part of their WinterFest workshop series. The event will include presentations from a panel of RSEs followed by Q&A and discussion. It will take place online, 14:00-15:30 GMT on Thursday 15th January 2026, and you can register to attend via Eventbrite.
On Tuesday 10th February, 10:00-16:30, STEP-UP, in collaboration with University of Cambridge Data Service and Reproducible Research Cambridge are organising an event in Cambridge as part of Love Data Week on Connecting research data and software communities: sharing experiences and creating opportunities. Registration is open via TicketTailor.
Following on from the successful, and heavily oversubscribed, Software Carpentry workshop that was run in early December, STEP-UP, in collaboration with RSLondon, will be running another Software Carpentry workshop, 16th-18th February 2026. We’re again looking for a significant number of helpers to support learners during this workshop. If you’re able to spare a day during this period to help out with bash shell (16th Feb), git version control (17th Feb) or introductory Python programming (18th Feb), please get in touch with the STEP-UP team to volunteer. For anyone interested in joining the workshop as an attendee, see the sign-up form for more details and registration.
The first Sustainability Conference for Responsible Research Computing (SC4RC) takes place 4th-8th May 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland and online. The conference is currently accepting abstract submissions, the submission deadline is 27th February 2026. Note that “early bird” pricing for in-person registration ends on 23rd January.
deRSE26 - the Conference for Research Software Engineering in Germany - will take place 3rd-5th March 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany. The call for abstracts is now closed but event registration is open with the “early bird” rate available until 31st January.
The Software Sustainability Institute’s Collaborations Workshop 2026 will take place in Belfast, 28th-30th April 2026. The CW26 team have recently announced the theme for this year’s workshop - Strengthening the Research Software Community. Tickets are still available at the early bird rate. See the workshop webpage for further details and registration.
EGI (originally the European Grid Infrastructure), will be holding their 2026 conference - EGI2026 - in Ghent, Belgium, 21st-25th September 2026. They’ve released a save the date announcement.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Max Gamill:
Hi! I’m Max, and I recently joined Imperial on the Research Software Engineer and High-Performance Computing Experience Programme this September. I work to take a research group’s code, trim the fat, and add all the baubles and tinsel to make their software shine. This has included test suites, designing front-end Django applications, and automated software to create new RSE projects with all the best practices baked in.
I started my software journey through my Physics bachelors, where writing code to draw graphs, compute differential equations, and model phenomena beat doing it all by hand. I took a small break working for IBM as a Technical Support Analyst, which taught me a great amount of patience for looking through log files. From here I continued onto a Master’s where I reconstructed 3D structures of T-cells from 2D images of high-density blinking lights attached to various proteins. I compared these 3D localisations between deep learning models and classical algorithms for their accuracy in single-molecule localisation microscopy.
I found seeing the unseen world of biological processes magnificent and continued transforming qualitative microscopy images into quantitative results during my PhD. I untangled the mysteries of DNA and RNA interactions at the nanoscale using atomic force microscopy and developed the image processing software AFMReader and TopoStats. The latter began with refactoring old Python 2 code to enable machine learning libraries, and writing test suites to improve trust in the software. This must have worked because the software has fostered a large community. Now at Imperial, I’m excited to help researchers unlock the same potential in their software and turn their code into robust, maintainable tools to uplift the wider community.
This month, our Research Software of the Month is Ethoscope, developed in the Department of Life Sciences by Dr. Giorgio Gilestro’s laboratory.
Ethoscope was created to address a fundamental bottleneck in behavioural neuroscience: while genetic tools for Drosophila research have become extraordinarily sophisticated, the ability to objectively monitor and quantify behaviour at scale has lagged behind. Commercial activity monitors are expensive, inflexible, and provide limited behavioural resolution. Meanwhile, academic video-tracking solutions typically require powerful centralised workstations and cannot scale easily.
Ethoscope takes a radically different approach. Each unit is a self-contained, autonomous machine built entirely from off-the-shelf components: a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, a standard Pi camera, a 3D-printed chassis, and infrared LED illumination—costing approximately €100 in total. Because each ethoscope handles its own video processing independently, dozens can run simultaneously without bottlenecks. The Gilestro lab routinely operates 70 units in parallel, monitoring over 1,400 individual flies in real-time across multiple temperature-controlled chambers.
What distinguishes ethoscope from simple activity monitors is its ability to classify behaviour using machine learning and to interface with robotic modules for closed-loop experiments. Ethoscopes can rotate individual tubes for targeted sleep deprivation, deliver odours or gases through pneumatic valves, or trigger optogenetic stimulation—all contingent on an animal’s real-time behaviour. This enables sophisticated experimental paradigms that were previously impractical at scale, including the yoked sleep deprivation protocol originally developed for rodents by Rechtschaffen in the 1980s, now adapted for flies.
The platform comprises two main components. The node runs on any Linux computer (with a dedicated LiveCD available for straightforward installation) and orchestrates all ethoscopes on the network through a web interface, managing experiments, scheduling, and data collection. It also coordinates a mesh of wireless environmental sensors based on ESP-32 microcontrollers for monitoring incubator conditions. The ethoscope software runs on each Raspberry Pi, performing autonomous real-time video tracking and controlling any attached robotic hardware independently.
The platform is supported by a complete data analysis ecosystem: rethomics, an R framework published in PLOS ONE (2019), and ethoscopy, a Python package with Jupyter integration published in Bioinformatics Advances (2023). The original ethoscope paper appeared in PLOS Biology’s “Cool Tools” series in 2017 and has since been cited in studies across the sleep, circadian, and behavioural genetics fields—including work published in Nature on sensory processing during sleep. The platform has been adopted by research groups internationally and continues to be actively developed. Everything—hardware designs, software, sensor firmware, and documentation—is released under open-source licenses and freely available.
GitHub: github.com/gilestrolab/ethoscope
Documentation: lab.gilest.ro/ethoscope
We’re delighted to announce that Adrian D’Alessandro, based in Imperial’s central Research Software Engineering team within the Research Computing Service, has been awarded one of the 2026 Software Sustainability Institute Fellowships. SSI’s annual fellowship call is always very competitive and we send our congratulations to Adrian on this achievement. Adrian will be continuing his work with the DIRECT Framework, an open, community-developed competency framework for Research Software Engineering, with his fellowship focusing specifically on building an open source developer community around the framework to help ensure its long-term sustainability. See the entry in our blog posts section below for more information about the 2026 fellows cohort.
The Software Sustainability Institute has recently announced the timeline for the second round of the Research Software Maintenance Fund which will open on 28th January 2026. In addition, SSI has also announced details of the 13 projects awarded funding through round 1 of the RSMF.
The RSECon26 organisers have announced a new research software submission type for the 2026 conference, providing the option to submit research software papers. The announcement highlights that this new submission type is “designed to support RSEs in sharing their work and gaining greater visibility for their contributions to research”. Paper submission is being provided in collaboration with the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), with authors submitting RSECon26 papers directly to the journal. See the announcement linked above for further details.
Several members of Imperial’s Research Software Community and Research Computing Service attended this year’s Computing Insight UK (CIUK 2025) conference in Manchester in early December. Within the packed 2-day programme, in addition to members of the community being involved in several breakout sessions as part of work under the UKRI DRI NetworkPlus projects and STEP-UP, there were excellent talks from Jack Coker (Research Software Engineering team, RCS) on “Carbon: A Lightweight Tool for Estimating Emissions of HPC Jobs”, Emily Lumley (Research Engagement Lead, RCS) on “A year in the life of research computing engagement at Imperial College London; Learning, listening and liquid cooling” and Saranjeet Kaur Bhogal (Research Software Engineering team, RCS) who gave a lightning talk titled “A Seat at the Table” during the CIUK 2025 WHPC breakfast session. Members of Imperial also participated in the CIUK Cluster Challenge and the VisibleHPC portable HPC cluster highlighted in last month’s newsletter made its second outing, being hosted on the CAKE stand in the exhibition hall, where it was a star attraction, as well as being demonstrated in the public engagement activities session.
As mentioned in the News section above, the Software Sustainability Institute have recently announced their 2026 Fellowship Cohort. You can find out more in the blog post Introducing the 2026 Fellowship Cohort: Insights and Celebrations.
ty: An extremely fast Python type checker and LSP written in Rust!
marimo is an interesting potential alternative to Jupyter notebooks. It’s git-friendly and helps to address some of the issues around reproducibility that notebooks can present, as discussed in A Large-Scale Study About Quality and Reproducibility of Jupyter Notebooks (DOI: 10.1109/MSR.2019.00077) and Computational reproducibility of Jupyter notebooks from biomedical publications.
An interesting video from ArjanCodes on the use of dependency injection in Python: Stop Hardcoding Everything: Use Dependency Injection
Future challenges for Research Software Engineering is a recently published paper reporting on the outputs of a session at the 2025 German RSE conference (deRSE25).
Stephen Hawking’s Floppy Disks & the Digital Legacy of Science: An Interview with Leontien Talboom presents some really interesting work being done at the University of Cambridge to recover data from archives that is stored on old floppy disks. The BBC also recently published an article on this work: A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks.
A recent Code for Thought podcast episode looked at the Audio Universe project - AudioUniverse: Let Data Speak for Themselves - with Chris Harrison, James Trayford. Another recent Code for Thought episode, continuing a series talking to the 2025 SSI Fellows, talks to three more Fellows from the 2025 cohort including Imperial’s Sangeeta Bhatia.
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:
The Research Computing and Data Science team at Imperial’s Early Career Researcher Institute run workshops in programming, statistics, data science, software engineering, Linux, HPC, AI for programming, LaTeX, and much more, which are available to the Imperial community. Follow the registration information on the RCDS page to sign up.
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 Jeremy Cohen. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.