2025 Community Award Results

Published: Sep 4, 2025

Overview

The 2025 US-RSE Community Awards recognize and celebrate the impactful contributions of individuals and teams who are advancing the field of research software engineering in the United States.

This year there were two categories of awards:

• Technical Excellence: Recognizes outstanding technical contributions that materially advance research software engineering practice. This award celebrates “the things RSEs do that are normally ignored.”
• Community Impact and Leadership: Honors leadership and service that amplifies the reach, visibility, and growth of the RSE profession. This award focuses on people who step beyond their own codebases to promote belonging, engagement, and awareness.

Each award also had two subcategories: Student/Early Career (current student or within five years of starting their career) and Professional.

Winners

We are pleased to announce this year’s winners for our two award categories. Each winner will receive a certificate as well as a $250 gift card. Please join us in congratulating our 2025 winners!

US-RSE Technical Excellence

Student/Early Career: Manoj Sundarrajan

Manoj Sundarrajan is a Research Software Engineer in the Vehicle Grid Integration group at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). He co-led the development of Caldera, an EV charge modeling toolkit that was a 2023 R&D 100 finalist. Caldera is utilized by several leading private industry institutions, research organizations, universities, and national labs. Manoj’s research focuses on developing tools for modeling and simulation of EV charging on the grid, as well as creating smart charge management solutions to enhance grid stability and reliability.

In addition to his role at INL, Manoj is a PhD student in the Systems Engineering at Colorado State University. Before joining INL in 2020, he earned his MS degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Anna University, India.

Professional: JAWS Team - Daniela Cassol, Mario Melara, Elais Player-Jackson, Ramani Kothadia, Setareh Sarrafan, Seung-Jin Sul, Nicholas Tyler

JAWS (JGI Analysis Workflow Service) is a scalable, multi-site workflow execution framework developed at the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), to support large-scale genomic data analysis. Designed for robust and secure scientific computing across national DOE facilities, JAWS empowers researchers to run complex, containerized workflows seamlessly across the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. It integrates Cromwell, HTCondor, and Globus to ensure reproducibility, portability, and performance monitoring, aligning with the DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure vision.

The JAWS team includes software engineers, data scientists, and user support specialists who collaboratively develop infrastructure and tools to meet evolving scientific and technical demands. The team supports production workflows across diverse domains, including metagenomics, genome assembly, transcriptomics, and annotation. Through continuous user engagement, strategic partnerships, and open science practices, JAWS contributes to the DOE scientific mission and energy research.

JAWS innovations include performance dashboards, support for GPU workloads, and secure multi-site job orchestration. As leaders in scalable workflow management, the JAWS team is advancing findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) workflows and empowers the scientific community with robust, portable bioinformatics pipelines.

US-RSE Community Impact and Leadership

Student/Early Career: Daniel Madren

Daniel joined Purdue University in April 2024 as a Senior Research Development Administrator for the newly established Center for Research Software Engineering (RSE) within the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC). In his role as Program Manager for RSE, he leads the design and execution of strategic project management processes, including intake workflows, service rate development, and long-term business planning. Daniel plays a pivotal role in shaping the Center’s operational strategy, cultivating cross-functional collaborations with academic and government stakeholders, and driving sustainable growth through diversified funding models. Daniel draws on deep expertise in both predictive and agile methodologies to manage a diverse portfolio of research projects. He also serves as Co-Chair of the US-RSE Group Leaders Network, where he supports national coordination and knowledge-sharing among RSE leaders to advance the research software community.

Professional: Rinku Gupta

Rinku Gupta is a Research Software Specialist and Technical Product Manager with over 20 years of experience in scientific computing. At Argonne National Laboratory, she leads multi-institutional computing projects and efforts to improve high-performance scientific software through research and community engagement.

Her work focuses on software sustainability, productivity, and fault tolerance at extreme scale. She has conducted research on DOE-funded efforts including the IDEAS, BSSw.io, and Argo projects, the VeloC checkpointing library, and the CESAR co-design center. As product manager for Aurora GPT and BSSw.io, she coordinates across scientific teams to support large-scale AI models for science, aligning priorities and fostering collaboration.

Ms. Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of the Better Scientific Software website (BSSw.io), a community resource focused on improving software quality and sustainability in computational science. She is also a recognized leader in the Research Software Engineer (RSE) movement. She served on the US-RSE Association Steering Committee (2023–2024) and has helped define and advocate for the RSE role at Argonne and across the broader HPC community. She has led lab-wide initiatives, cross-divisional collaboration, and peer networks supporting RSEs.

She holds a B.E. in Computer Engineering from Mumbai University and an M.S. from The Ohio State University.