US-RSE January 2023 Newsletter

January 2023

newsletter

Published: Jan 24, 2023

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

Thank you to the nine excellent candidates who shared their vision for the US-RSE Association’s future and the 135 US-RSE members who voted in the 2022 Steering Committee election. The four candidates elected to a two-year term starting January 2023 are:

  • Julia Damerow
  • Rinku Gupta
  • Kenton McHenry
  • Miranda Mundt

We’re excited to welcome three new members to the Steering Committee and to have Julia back for two more years.

Thanks to our other excellent candidates Keith Beattie, Aaron Holmes, Lauren Milechin, Lance Parsons, and Joshua Teves for making the election a success. All of them have helped to grow US-RSE and make it successful. We look forward to their continued contributions.

We extend a special thank you to Lance Parsons who was a founding member of the Steering Committee and has volunteered hundreds of hours over the past four years creating US-RSE. We especially want to acknowledge his continuing work with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion working group and the Code of Conduct review effort.

We also want to thank two outgoing Steering Committee members who did not participate in the election, Daniel Katz and Chris Hill. Both are founding members of the US-RSE Association and US-RSE Steering Committee. They brought decades of experience to establish US-RSE, connect it to the broader research software community, and set US-RSE up for a bright future. Both Dan and Chris are still leading various community activities and initiatives, so we can expect to continue to benefit from their experience and leadership.

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!

Thank you to all those who volunteered to act as a chair for the organizing committee. The chairs are:

  • General: Sandra Gesing, Julia Damerow
  • Diversity: Ludovico Bianchi, Tab Memmott, Lance Parsons
  • Outreach: Caleb Jackson, Miranda Mundt
  • Program: Kenton McHenry
  • Publication: Charles Ferenbaugh, Torin White
  • Sponsor: Angela Herring, Mahmood Shad, Chris Hill
  • Student: Nicole Brewer, Carrie Brown

If you’d like to volunteer for a particular committee, please let us know!

Steering Committee Recap

In November and December, the Steering Committee discussed moving to a new fiscal sponsor that would be able to better support our future financial sustainability. The Steering Committee voted to apply to a new sponsor.

The Steering Committee has also continued planning for the 2023 US-RSE Conference, including choosing chairs for the conference planning committees, discussing what benefits are appropriate to offer to conference sponsors, and reviewing costs.

Discussions about applying for funding for a community manager, executive director, organizational infrastructure, outreach efforts, and the US-RSE conference also continue, with a focus on refining a budget and the details of what paid positions would do for US-RSE.

Community News

US-RSE Funders Talk Series: Joshua Greenberg - Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

US-RSE is happy to be continuing its series of conversations with funders for 1) RSEs to learn about funding opportunities and review and other processes, 2) RSEs to ask questions of the funder, and 3) funders to ask questions and learn about RSEs.

Please join us in this interactive conversation. (If you can’t participate in the interactive event, where you will be able to ask questions and help funders understand US-RSE, it will also be recorded.)

Date/Time: Thursday, February 2nd at 4 PM ET, 3 PM CT, 2 PM MT, 1 PM PT

Register Now!

Biography: Dr. Joshua Greenberg is director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Digital Information Technology program. Dr. Greenberg received his Bachelor of Arts in History of Science, Medicine and Technology from the Johns Hopkins University, and both Masters and Doctoral degrees from Cornell University’s Department of Science & Technology Studies.

He is an active member of the broader digital library and digital humanities communities, serving on a number of advisory boards and program committees, and maintains active research and teaching interests in the history and sociology of information technology, the dynamics of public engagement with expert knowledge, and the methodological implications of new digital technologies for research.

Dr. Greenberg has broad experience and understanding of the content and research needs of traditional scholarly communities as well as digitally-networked services and tools to support myriad forms of public engagement and participation.

Stay tuned for more talks in the coming months, with talks from NIH and CZI expected!

US-RSE DEI-WG Speaker Series

The US-RSE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Working Group (DEI-WG) is working to bring the US-RSE community quarterly visits from RSE professionals with vested interests or research into DEI in the RSE community at large. Our community pledges to continually educate ourselves through research on best practices focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. US-RSE is committed to providing an inclusive environment with equitable treatment for all and to promoting and encouraging diversity throughout the RSE community. We encourage everyone to suggest speakers and topics and are open to different formats and timelines of the events. Feedback is much appreciated.

Interesting Events and Opportunities

RDA’s 10th Anniversary Events and Activities

In 2023, the Research Data Alliance is celebrating its 10th Anniversary: ‘A Decade of Data’. It is commemorating this milestone with the community by organizing a series of international and regional events and activities. Each month of 2023, from February to November, will be dedicated to a specific theme related to research data management of relevance to the RDA community. February’s theme will be FAIR data, hardware, and software, and it includes a podcast on February 6 on the FAIR for Virtual Research Environments (VRE) Working Group. Registration for the events is free but required for webinars.

Funding Opportunity from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for Open Source Software

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation opened a Call for Letters of Inquiry: Institutional Support for Open Source Software in Research, with responses due February 15, 2023.

The Technology program at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports research, training, community-building, and technological innovation in order to foster advances in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. The program is currently soliciting Letters of Inquiry from Principal Investigators at U.S. research institutions to launch Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). A small number of full proposals will be invited from submissions received in response to this Call. Grant amounts are expected to be up to $750,000 over a two-year period. Successful Letters of Inquiry will offer a clear vision for a long-term institutional support ecosystem for open source software - and the university faculty, students, research software engineers, and staff who build and maintain it - beyond the funding period.

Interesting Reads, Videos or Podcasts

Items you may have missed on the blog and Slack:

US-RSE Outreach

RSEs in eScience 2022 Workshop Report

If you were unable to come to Salt Lake City, UT, for the inaugural RSEs in eScience Workshop, the Outreach Working Group has posted a report on the talks and breakout discussion. See for yourself!

The Outreach Working Group is looking for volunteers to help with organizing workshops, birds of a feather (BoF), symposiums, etc. Roles range from organizer to reviewer to speaker and more.

If you are interested in getting involved in a US-RSE hosted event, please reach out to the working group via the #wg-outreach slack channel or wg-outreach@us-rse.org.

See how we are doing financially

We currently organize US-RSE finances 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 2022 we added over 600 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 Opportunities page:

  1. Research Software Engineer II: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ Posted: Jan 19, 2023
  2. Research Software Engineer II: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ Posted: Jan 19, 2023
  3. Bioinformatics Postdoc: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY, NY (Remote option) Posted: Jan 04, 2023
  4. Scientific Software Developer: Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY (remote, telework can be negotiated) Posted: Dec 28, 2022
  5. Application Systems Analyst/Programmer Lead: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI or Remote Posted: Dec 14, 2022
  6. Research Software Engineer: Stanford University, Stanford, CA Posted: Dec 13, 2022
  7. Full Stack Software Engineer - Application Engineering: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN Posted: Dec 13, 2022
  8. Postdoctoral Fellow Position in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research and Data Science: Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN Posted: Dec 09, 2022
  9. Research IT Sr. Systems Engineer: Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD/hybrid Posted: Dec 08, 2022
  10. Research Software Engineer: Topos Institute, Berkeley, CA (required) Posted: Dec 08, 2022
  11. Research Software Engineer: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Posted: Dec 06, 2022
  12. Senior Research Software Engineer: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL Posted: Dec 06, 2022
  13. Software Engineer: Simons Foundation, New York, NY Posted: Dec 06, 2022
  14. DevOps Engineer: Simons Foundation/Flatiron Institute, New York, NY Posted: Dec 05, 2022
  15. Senior Application Developer: Wharton Computing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Posted: Dec 02, 2022
  16. Research Software Engineer: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ Posted: Dec 02, 2022
  17. Research Software Engineer: MED-EL Corporation, Durham, NC Posted: Dec 02, 2022
  18. Lead Software Engineer: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia Posted: Nov 29, 2022
  19. Senior Software Engineer: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia Posted: Nov 29, 2022
  20. Software Engineer: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia Posted: Nov 29, 2022
  21. Web Developer and Cloud Architect: UCLA, Office of Advanced Research Computing, Can be remote/flexible Posted: Nov 22, 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.

Share