These days, London has been feeling the effects of a strong heatwave, with more hot weather likely on the horizon. When the mercury rises like this, it’s hard not to think about the broader patterns of our planet. The Copernicus project and its interactive climate data apps (apps.climate.copernicus.eu) allow you to explore these trends in detail, offering insights that are both impressive and slightly alarming. Quite fascinating.
But let’s be honest: sitting in front of a switched-on computer, which essentially acts as a small heater, is not exactly the most comfortable experience in this kind of weather. You might find it much more refreshing to step away from the screen for a while and take a walk in the shade. To stay productive and mindful without staring at a monitor, you could spend that time listening to one of the podcasts suggested in this issue. It’s a good way to keep your mind engaged while letting your body cool down.
Enjoy!
The Imperial Research Software Engineering Team is delivering a brand new Digital Research Sustainability Course. The training is targeted at any researchers and digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) who use computing and digital resources in their work and will take place on Tuesday 7th July 2026, in person, at the White City campus. You can register here.
rOpenSci’s next Social Coworking and office hours session is scheduled for Tuesday 7th July 2026, 09:00 Americas/Pacific (17:00 BST). This month’s theme is “Debugging in R”, a great chance to work quietly or join a focused discussion on R tools. More details are available on the here.
A joint 1-day introductory workshop on Isambard-AI is being run by the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing (BriCS) and The Alan Turing Institute. It will take place in London on Tuesday 21st July 2026. To take part in the workshop, you must pre-register by 5PM on Tuesday 7th July 2026.
The University of Sheffield RSE team is running a hands-on workshop, “Building Practical AI Agents Using Claw”, on Saturday 11th July 2026 in Sheffield. Spaces are limited, so check the link for remaining spaces and registration.
Registrations are open for the inaugural Teaching and Training SIG Community Days, happening in Manchester on Tuesday 14th and Wednesday 15th July 2026. Find out more here.
If you missed the first round of RSECon26 bursaries, the second and final application window is currently open. Deadline is 18th July 2026.
On Friday 24th July 2026, Imperial’s sustainable research computing culture project, in collaboration with the STEP-UP project, will host an event on “Developing a Sustainable Research Computing Environment at UK Universities”. The event will represent the official launch of Imperial’s new Digital Research Sustainability short course highlighted above, alongside the opportunity to hear from people at Imperial and from the wider UK research community working on sustainable research computing. Registration for the event is now open. See the event page for further details and registration.
ASSET Conference 2026 is scheduled for 29–31 July in Manchester, UK and Nairobi, Kenya. It covers adaptive and sustainable science and engineering, including internet of things, AI and big data. Registration will close on 28th July 2026. Details and registration link are available here.
Registration is now open for AICatalyst2026: AI in the Biosciences Training Conference, taking place in York on Friday 4th September 2026.
RSECon26, the 10th annual conference for Research Software Engineering, will take place in Sheffield from 9th-11th September 2026. The deadline for in-person registration is 31st July 2026. For those interested in the co-located International Research Software Conference (IRSC26), being held on Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th September, registration is also open.
The 2026 US-RSE Conference will take place in San Jose, CA, from 19th-21st October 2026. While the call for papers has closed, you can still submit posters until Friday 7th August. More info here.
In this month’s Research Computing at Imperial feature, we’re featuring some of our STEP-UP Digital Research Technical Champions. In this edition we hear from Nikolaos Giakoumoglou, Laura Ellington and Alex Matthew who each tell us a little about their research and their motivation for joining the Research Software Champions programme:
I am a PhD student at Imperial College London, where my research relies heavily on GPU computing, data storage and management, and software development. My work involves running large numbers of experiments to develop and evaluate deep learning models, making efficient use of computational resources essential. Throughout my PhD, I have encountered many challenges related to research infrastructure, software tools, and computational workflows, often spending significant time identifying solutions and learning best practices.
I chose to become a STEP-UP Champion because I want to help bring researchers together to collaborate, share experiences, discuss challenges, and find solutions as a community. Almost everyone encounters technical problems during their research, whether related to software, data, computing resources, or infrastructure, and often spends hours or even days finding a solution. By creating opportunities for researchers to exchange knowledge and learn from one another, we can help people overcome common challenges more quickly, avoid duplicating effort, and benefit from the experience of others.
Another motivation is to better understand the challenges researchers face with existing infrastructure and to help promote the services, resources, and support already available across Imperial. In many cases, powerful tools and facilities exist, but researchers may not be aware of them or may not know how to use them effectively. I am interested not only in encouraging wider adoption of these resources, but also in promoting their correct and efficient use.
I am particularly interested in promoting good practices in software and hardware. This includes everything from code organisation, version control, and reproducible workflows to data management, documentation, and effective use of computational resources. I believe that sharing these practices can improve research quality, increase productivity, and help build a stronger, more connected research community across Imperial.
Links:
Personal webpage: https://giakoumoglou.com
GitHub: https://github.com/giakoumoglou/
Imperial: https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/n.giakoumoglou23/
I am a PhD student in the OptiML PSE group in the Department of Chemical Engineering, working with BASF as part of the CDT in Green Industrial Futures. My work aims to combine artificial intelligence and optimisation techniques to design more sustainable chemical supply chains. More broadly, I am interested in the development of decision-support tools. My research involves contributing to research software, using high-performance computing, and managing literature data, so I am familiar with challenges in digital research. Prior to starting my PhD, during my Master’s in Chemistry with the Jelfs Computational Materials Group, I developed an LLM-based text-mining workflow to extract information on porous liquids from the scientific literature and construct an open database. This project emphasised to me the value of accessible data and reusable software, while also highlighting the challenges involved.
I chose to become a STEP-UP Champion because I have seen how good software engineering and data management practices can improve the quality, reproducibility, and impact of research. I am particularly interested in promoting sustainable approaches to research software and data management, ensuring that research outputs remain accessible and useful beyond the lifetime of a project. Through the Champion programme, I hope to contribute to a supportive community where researchers can learn from one another and make use of the excellent digital research support available across Imperial. Please feel free to get in touch if you have any ideas or have encountered any challenges related to digital research, particularly in database development, chemistry, or chemical engineering! I am a second year PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London. My research focuses on the performance changes and dynamic behaviour of turbomachinery blades subjected to erosion. I develop computational methods to investigate how different erosion geometries influence the vibration characteristics of blades, including their natural frequencies and mode shapes. My work involves developing custom numerical methods, finite element models, and post-processing tools to study the effects of erosion and to improve the understanding of structural dynamics in turbomachinery. My research aims at developing novel and efficient computational approaches that could be adapted to a range of engineering problems. Multi domain implementation and application of shareable ideas could work effectively only if there is reproducibility achieved through structured practices.
I was keen to become a Research Software Champion because software development is an integral part of our day-to-day research and I was very new to it when I had started my PhD. Much of my work involves writing custom Python code to automate finite element modelling, develop numerical solvers, process simulation results, and implement new computational methods that are not available in commercial software. I could also learn the high importance of Research Software Engineering through the UTC networks associated to our research group. Through this experience, I have learned the importance of writing clear, well-documented, and reproducible research software that others can understand, verify, and build upon.
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.
Imperial’s ICT team are seeing more and more sophisticated phishing attacks attempting to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication to hack Imperial, and that’s exactly why you must set up a passkey. If you have any issues setting up your passkey, or you have any feedback, you can speak to your department’s Passkey Champion (IT Rep) in the first instance, or contact the ICT Service Desk.
The Imperial Central Research Software Engineering Team is pleased to announce the new Open-Source Enhancement Fund (OSEF), an initiative to support the impact and quality of open-source software developed at Imperial.
The OSEF programme offers up to £10,000 of in-kind funding for specialised research software engineer support (~22 days of work in total), to encourage and foster open-source software developed by research groups or individuals throughout the University, with the aim to increase its quality, impact and sustainability. Up to 4 projects can be funded on this round. The support can take on a variety of forms, but the purpose is fundamentally to encourage the adoption of open research practices to software development. Check the OSEF webpage for more details on what this funding can be requested for.
Application opens on the 1st of July and closes on the 30th of August, with the outcome about successful applicants planned by mid-September.
Researchers at the University of Warwick are inviting Research Technical Professionals to share their experiences in a survey focused on mapping and evaluating dRTPs’ contributions to computing skills pedagogies in HE.
The RSE Survey Data Release is now available, providing a wealth of information on the current state of the RSE community.
A recent post from Open Science NL argues that “A holistic approach to professional technical digital research is possible”, providing a perspective on how to structure these roles.
The Software Sustainability Institute recently announced the Inclusivity and Accessibility in Recruitment guide, which offers practical advice for people recruiting technical teams and looking to make their recruitment processes more inclusive, accessible and equitable.
In the blog post “Research Software Engineers in the Age of GenAI: Same Value, Changing Practice”, the authors discuss how the role of the RSE is evolving in response to the rise of generative AI.
For those who enjoy podcasts, The Real Python Podcast is a great resource for staying up to date with the Python ecosystem.
Recent episodes of Code for Thought have been particularly relevant to our community, with deep dives into secure data principles for digital research, Agile development, and storage media. It also features an episode in Spanish about software engineering for research.
If you’re looking for a high-level overview of software engineering trends, Software Engineering Radio is a long-standing and highly respected podcast.
Git worktrees have been around for a while, but they are gaining traction in the era of agentic coding. This post explains how worktrees are a useful feature for managing multiple versions of a codebase simultaneously.
If you use ParaView and have ever been stuck with this powerful visualisation tool, you can now access targeted support and discussion through their Office Hours.
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.
If you’re reading this on the web and would like to receive the next newsletter directly to your inbox then please subscribe to our Research Software Community Mailing List.
This issue of the Research Software Community Newsletter was edited by Stefano Galvan. All previous newsletters are available in our online archive.