US-RSE October 2022 Newsletter

October 2022

newsletter supercomputing

Published: Nov 4, 2022

In this monthly newsletter, we share recent, current, and planned activities of the US-RSE Association, and related news that we think is of interest to US-RSE members. Newsletters are also available on our website alongside the growing resources and information on the US-RSE Association. To receive our newsletter, join US-RSE.

In this issue:

Steering Committee Elections

The yearly election cycle for the Steering Committee is underway. Information on the candidates will be posted soon. Voting will occur December 2-9, 2022. US-RSE members were sent an email with the subject “US-RSE Membership Verification” in October confirming their membership. Everyone who is a member of US-RSE as of November 20th can vote in the election. Question about your membership status? Email membership@us-rse.org.

First US-RSE Conference in 2023 in Chicago

We are excited to organize the first US-RSE Conference, October 16-18, 2023 at the University of Illinois, Chicago! We are looking for volunteers for the organizing committee. We see this as a chance to make it a community-driven event where community members can build the program. We have several chair positions available, and we aim to have a chair and a co-chair for each role. We would also like to encourage people who do not have experience in organizing conferences to apply for a position, and we will pair them with a more experienced chair. This is an opportunity for you to build and demonstrate leadership skills and have deep involvement in community engagement. Please take under consideration that it is a commitment of about a year with biweekly meetings at the beginning, moving to weekly meetings starting in April 2023 and additionally the actual tasks for the conference dependent on your chair role. Please fill out this form if you are interested. https://forms.gle/Ck4sAgwFLvLcTt17A

RSE-HPC-2022 Workshop at SC22

We are excited to announce the Research Software Engineers in HPC Workshop (RSE-HPC-2022) to be held as part of SC22 (hybrid event, in Dallas, TX and virtually). This will be a half-day workshop 1:30pm-5:00pm CST (UTC-6), Sunday, November 13, 2022.

This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC, from all over the world, to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders. We’ll discuss the current activities and plans of national RSE organizations, discuss the needs of RSEs and RSE groups, and brainstorm ways RSE organizations can help address these.

Participation is open to all SC22 attendees who have registered to attend the conference workshops.

For more information, see the workshop website or contact the organizers.

US-RSE SC22 Booth

For the first time ever US-RSE will have an exhibitor booth at SC22! We’ll be spreading the good word about RSEs and staffing the booth with friendly faces looking to give away some US-RSE swag (stickers, pens, etc.) and other promotional material. So if you’ll be at SC22, come stop by booth 4201. And if you’d like join in the conversation or help with the booth head over to slack channel #sc22.

ADSA/US-RSE Career Support Workshop

The Academic Data Science Alliance (ADSA) and US-RSE hosted a workshop to create resources to help academic institutions and those who hire and manage staff data scientists and RSEs support their careers - from recruitment to professional development and retention. The workshop took place on October 24-25, 2022 in Chicago. Participants spent two days developing the initial draft of a handbook that addresses how data scientists, research software engineers, hiring managers, and administrators can successfully create rewarding career paths for these new types of positions. Work continues and the goal is to publish a version of the handbook in 2023, after which it will become a living document open for additional input and community contirbutions.

Help Create an RSE Job Description Archive

Following the recent ADSA/US-RSE Academic Data Scientist/RSE Career Support Workshop that is writing a handbook on hiring and supporting DSs/RSEs at academic institutions, we would like to archive the full postings for jobs listed on the US-RSE Job Board on a regular basis. This archive would help people writing job descriptions for their own institutions, and it could also help applicants to see the range of RSE positions available. If you think you could set up an automated system to periodically collect the original full postings from company/university sites and archive them, please get in touch with Christina Maimone via email or on Slack.

Steering Committee Recap

Since August, the Steering Committee has been discussing and working on the following topics:

  • The first US-RSE Conference in October 2023: more details in this newsletter
  • What funding US-RSE needs to grow as a community and what paid positions US-RSE needs to be successful, such as a Community Manager
  • Improving the Code of Conduct reporting and response processes (there’s a working group for anyone interested)
  • Distribution of US-RSE swag and options for opening a US-RSE store again this year for fundraising
  • Community events and virtual talk series
  • Governance of US-RSE, including issues such as: the structure of, and communication between, working groups and whether an advisory board separate from the Steering Committee would be useful

Community News

Funders Conversation Series

A subgroup of the US-RSE Outreach Working Group is organizing a Funder Series, a speaker series aimed at bringing representatives from funders (e.g., DOE, Sloan, NSF, NIH) to speak to members of US-RSE. These funders will bring essential information about opportunities, strategies, and starting points for finding funding.

The first talk, which went well and received very good feedback, was from Hal Finkel from DOE on October 27th, and we’ll soon be adding his slides and a recording to this part of the Outreach WG webpage. Future talks will happen on a roughly 6-8 week cadence, so the next one should be in early December. If you have feedback on the first event or suggestions for future speakers, please let Dan know.

RSE Stories Podcast - Now Developer Stories!

The Research Software Engineer Stories podcast has been rebranded to Developer Stories Podcast to be more inclusive. Listen to the first episodes under the new name, starting with a Halloween special by the founder of the podcast series, Vanessa Sochat!

November Community Call

The topic of the November community call, on November 10, 2022 at 12ET/11CT/10MT/9PT, will be “RSE Project Management: Challenge of Adopting Agile Methodologies in RSE Projects.”

After the amazing Education & Training lecture by Angela Herring on Agile Project Management, this month’s community call will be “all about agile development.” Have you struggled with incorporating agile methodologies into your software development process? Have you invented your own methodology that you would like to share? Would you like to discuss challenges you encountered and solutions you found with like-minded people? This community call is for you then! Come and join us for an hour of agile fun!

Interesting Events

Interesting Reads, Videos or Podcasts

Items you may have missed on the blog and Slack:

Elevating RSEs Working Group

Many of us have similar stories in regards to recognizing the criticality of our roles in supporting modern research endeavors, yet struggle to gain the recognition of that amongst campus leadership, which oftentimes still thinks in terms of more traditional university roles such as faculty and students. The aim of the Elevating RSEs working group is to help all of us make this clearer at our various organizations. A key aspect of this is making it very clear to researchers, as well as funding agencies, the scientific discoveries that we are enabling, the scholarship that could not be done otherwise. As a first step we are soliciting from the RSE community stories of such discoveries that were RSE enabled! If you have such a story please fill out this brief form. From these stories we will be doing three things in the short term:

  • highlighting one story in our newsletter each month,
  • compiling a slide deck (here) with these stories that we can pull slides from when we talk about the importance of RSEs with our colleagues, collaborators, and leadership, and
  • collecting outreach channels we should aim to include for our newsletters and other outreach activities.

Longer-term plans include other activities along this front such as an RSE conference where submitted papers are peer reviewed on both the science and the RSE aspects of the effort. If you have other ideas and are interested in being part of this working group, please join the #wg-elevate-rse channel in the USRSE slack.

US-RSE Outreach

Please join us in Dallas, Texas, after the RSEs in HPC Workshop, for our US-RSE Social Event. Check the event page or Slack for details on the location!

Have you ever wondered, “Where can I find existing material (presentations, slides, videos, etc.) about the US-RSE?” The US-RSE Outreach Materials Google Drive is a location for any US-RSE member to put content relating to RSE or US-RSE outreach! Have you done a presentation? Made a cool one-page guide? Written an article or a blog post? We encourage you to add it!

See how we are doing financially

We organize US-RSE financials transparently via the Open Collective project. You can see all budgets, expenses, and contributions on this site. Anyone can go to the site and see the current accounts, income and expenses and ….. (if the mood takes you and you are able) make a tax-deductible gift to US-RSE!

Get Involved

There are lots of ways to get involved with the US-RSE community. Of course, you can join us on Slack. We’re also looking for ideas and help in many other places. See our list of projects and let us know how you’d like to help. Help with things like the Website Committee, Social Media, Community Engagement, Fundraising, and Newsletter are all needed and welcome.

As always we thank everyone who is already contributing for their help in shaping and growing the organization. In 2021 we added nearly 300 new members. There are still many more RSEs and friends of RSEs we would like to help connect and support. If you are interested in helping in any way please feel free to join in.

US-RSE Working Groups:

Recent Job Postings

These opportunities were recently posted to the RSE Careers page:

  1. Scientific Software Developer: NASA/GSFC/SESDA/ADNET, Greenbelt, MD Posted: Nov 03, 2022
  2. Systems Software Engineer: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA Posted: Nov 01, 2022
  3. Theoretical and Computational Postdoctoral Scholar: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA Posted: Nov 01, 2022
  4. Associate Applications Developer, ICICLE: The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH Posted: Oct 31, 2022
  5. Research Software Developer: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Berkeley, CA (Remote Friendly) Posted: Oct 31, 2022
  6. Research Software Engineer: Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  7. Research Software Engineer (Entry Level): RAND Corporation, Various cities (US) Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  8. Research Software Engineer: Translational NeuroEngineering Laboratory, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  9. Research Software Engineer, Data Science: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Full remote Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  10. Research Software Engineer: Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  11. Research Software Engineer: Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, OR Posted: Oct 28, 2022
  12. Senior Software Engineer: Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering (NAISE), Chicago, IL Posted: Oct 27, 2022
  13. Developer: Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source (APS), Chicago, IL Posted: Oct 27, 2022
  14. Developer Intermediate: Argonne National Laboratory, Sector 21 (LS-CAT) of the Advanced Photon Source, Chicago, IL Posted: Oct 27, 2022
  15. Computational Science Specialist: North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC Posted: Oct 21, 2022
  16. Research Software Engineer: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA (remote optional) Posted: Oct 19, 2022
  17. Research Software Engineer, Infrastructure: EcoHealth Alliance, New York, NY (remote optional) Posted: Oct 17, 2022
  18. Analyst Programmer Sr.: Polarization Lab at Duke University, Durham, NC Posted: Oct 13, 2022
  19. Research Software Engineer (Bioinformatics): University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, remote/hybrid (Worcester, MA or Greater Boston Area) Posted: Sep 28, 2022
  20. Data Library Engineer: University of California, San Francisco, Remote or San Francisco Posted: Sep 12, 2022
  21. Software Engineer: Globus - University of Chicago, Chicago, IL or remote/flexible Posted: Sep 12, 2022
  22. Senior Research Software Engineer: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Posted: Sep 01, 2022
  23. Associate Research Software Engineer/Research Software Engineer/Senior Research Software Engineer: National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois Posted: Sep 01, 2022
  24. Scientific Software Developer for Wind Energy: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Boulder, CO Posted: Aug 31, 2022
  25. Computer Scientist/Engineer: SLAC National Accelerator Lab, Menlo Park, CA Posted: Aug 18, 2022
  26. Research Software Engineer: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN Posted: Aug 16, 2022
  27. Senior Research Software Engineer: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Posted: Aug 03, 2022

Other Job Boards

The following boards might also be of interest.

  1. Software Carpentries Job Opportunities
  2. Academic Data Science Alliance Jobs
  3. Society of Research Software Engineering Vacancies

Please read our job posting policy first, then fill out this google form to request additions to the job board.

This newsletter is a joint effort of members of the US-RSE Association.

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