We are entering the warmer months in the UK and with that comes a busy season of conferences, workshops and events. In this issue of the newsletter, we have a round-up of some of the key dates for your diary, as well as news from the Research Software Engineering community at Imperial and beyond. Hopefully you find some time to enjoy the sunshine (and remember to stay hydrated!).
| Date | Event | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st June | STEP-UP RDM: Structuring Research Materials | Course | Online |
| 8th June | STEP-UP RDM: Tabular Data Collection | Course | Online |
| 15th June | Deadline for RTP survey | Survey | Online |
| 17th June | STEP-UP seminar: Research Software Challenges | Seminar | London |
| 18th June | AI Carpentry GenAI + Teaching Discussions | Community Discussion | Online |
| 21st June | Deadline for Swiss RSE Day 2026 call for proposals | Call for Proposals | Zurich |
| 29th June | STEP-UP RS London 2026 | Conference | London |
| 14th-15th July | Teaching and Training SIG Community Days | Community Days | Manchester |
| 31st July | Deadline for RSECon26 registration | Registration | Sheffield |
| 7th August | Deadline for US-RSE Conference poster submissions | Call for Posters | San Jose, CA |
The STEP-UP training team will be running two online Introduction to Research Data Management courses on the 1st and 8th June 2026. The session on “Structuring Research Materials” will take place 10:30-12:30 on Monday 1st June - further information and registration. The session on “Tabular Data Collection” will take place 10:30-12:30 on Monday 8th June - further information and registration.
Researchers at the University of Manchester are inviting Research Technicians and Technology & Skills Specialists across all disciplines to share their experiences in a short survey. The anonymous survey takes approximately 15 minutes and the deadline is Monday 15th June. This study explores the role of Research Technical and Professional (RTP) specialists in advancing open research, as well as the barriers and challenges they may face in becoming involved. The research team wants to hear about how your work supports transparent, reproducible, and robust research; recognition, support, and training needs in your role; and barriers or challenges in engaging with open research practices.
Join the STEP-UP and RSLondon communities for a seminar at Imperial College London on Wednesday 17th June 2026, 15:00-16:30. Dr Teresa Gomez-Diaz, CNRS Research Engineer at LIGM, Université Gustave Eiffel, will speak about “Research Software Challenges - what are they and how to tackle them”. The seminar will be followed by refreshments and networking. Further details and registration.
The Carpentries is hosting a new series of GenAI + Teaching Discussions, bringing educators together to share their experiences: the challenges and opportunities they have identified, strategies they have tried in response, and what they learned in the process. The first calls will take place on Thursday 18th June. Find out more and how to register on the AI Carpentry website.
Registration and the call for proposals are now open for the Annual Swiss RSE Day 2026, being held in ETH Zurich Centrum on 31st August 2026. Contributions can take the form of a 20-minute presentation, a digital presentation during the apero, or a poster. The submission deadline is 21st June 2026.
The STEP-UP RSLondon Conference 2026 will take place on Monday 29th June at the Francis Crick Institute. Register by Friday 12th June!
Registrations are open for the inaugural Teaching and Training SIG Community Days happening in Manchester on Tuesday 14th July and Wednesday 15th July.
The 2026 US-RSE Conference will take place in San Jose, CA, October 19th-21st 2026. The call for paper, workshop and BoF session submissions has now closed but poster submissions can be made until Friday 7th August 2026.
Registration is open for RSECon26, the 10th annual conference for Research Software Engineering, which will take place in Sheffield 9-11 September 2026. You have until the 31st of July to register for in-person attendance. Registration is also open for the co-located International Research Software Conference (IRSC26) from 7-8 September 2026.
This month, in our series highlighting members of the Imperial community helping to support research computing, we hear from Sally Matson:
My name is Sally Matson and I work as a Software Developer on Virtual Ecosystem, a digital-twin ecological modelling project within Rob Ewers’ group in the Department of Life Sciences. When I joined the team I had almost no background in ecology, which is what I love about working as a RSE: getting exposed to new research themes and scientific concepts that lay well beyond my own expertise.
One core feature I implemented for the VE was a stoichiometry model for the plants, so that we can allocate and track carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus through a tree’s life cycle. We keep all elemental mass in balance with the soil model (so that we don’t take more than exists), and the animals model (when an animal eats fruit we need to know exactly what it is eating.) These interactions add layers of complexity to the code, but this is also what makes our model unique and powerful.
I spent two months on secondment in the Central RSE team, where I was exposed to the breadth of projects that RSEs are working on across Imperial. As an RSE, it’s fun to see what different tools, approaches, and problems people are working on across the university.
Our Research Software of the Month feature is taking a break this month but we’ll be back with more details of interesting software packages and libraries over the coming months.
In May 2026, Imperial launched its new ICT Sustainability Roadmap which aligns with Imperial’s commitment to reach net zero Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions by 2040 and to minimise Scope 3 emissions wherever possible. Read more on Sustainability in ICT and seven practical steps you can take to help support it.
Do you want to provide RSEs in and from overlooked regions a community to belong to? If so, consider promoting Equersa within your networks. It is the first global RSE conference in collaboration with RSE Asia, RSE AUNZ, RSE Argentina, and RSE Chile, running from 25th - 27th August.
Interested in exploring git commands that can help to diagnose potential issues in a new codebase even before opening a single file? Check out the blog post on “The Git Commands I Run Before Reading Any Code”.
YAML is bad and TOML is good, or is it the other way around? In this blog post “In defense of YAML the author traces the history of the configuration formats and sheds light on what’s new.
Open source projects are taking a position on AI-assisted code and one of them is to include the use of the “Assisted-by” git tag. Read more about it in the blog post “Assisted-by: How open source projects are drawing the line on AI contributions”.
If you develop R packages, you might want to check out the new release of Jarl 0.5.0. It includes two new rules unused_function and duplicated_function_definition that can help you find potential issues in your code.
We have a number of podcasts published from Code for Thought this month:
In a new series of guides on research software, the Software Sustainability Institute has published a number of resources recently:
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 how-tos 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.