About US-RSE

The US Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) is a community-driven effort focused on the increasingly important role of the Research Software Engineer. We focus our efforts on 4 overarching goals: Community, Advocacy, Resources, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Read more about our goals on our mission statement page.

The US-RSE Association is committed to providing an inclusive environment with equitable treatment for all and to promoting and encouraging diversity throughout the RSE community in the US. We encourage you to read our full DEI mission statement.

Membership in US-RSE is easy and free. We welcome all, regardless of geographic location or affiliation, who support our organizational mission. Our members come from all types of institutions/organizations and all types of roles including those who identify as RSEs, those interested in a career as an RSE, and those who may not be RSEs but consider themselves RSE “allies” or manage individuals in RSE roles.

Research Software

The increasing use of digital technologies across research communities has gone hand in hand with a strong growth and reliance on software written or customized to solve research problems: research software. This, in turn, is driving dialog around opportunities to:

• improve the development of research software, and
• incentivize useful sharing, curation, and ongoing maintenance of research software artifacts and related knowledge.

Of course, research software does not develop, curate, or maintain itself. Accordingly, widespread research software growth has included emerging roles for people who create, maintain, and contribute to the research software ecosystem. These roles can bring value directly through enabling specific research projects. They also bring value indirectly, through helping ensure enduring impact of research software innovations and by facilitating adequate reproducibility standards in digital science.

Initiatives in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere are bringing together the community of people writing and contributing to research software at the national and international level. In the US this encompasses universities, laboratories, knowledge institutes, companies and other enterprises. US-RSE is part of that effort.

History of The US-RSE Association

The US-RSE Association can trace its roots back to two activities in the winter of 2017-2018. The first was an international survey of RSEs. There was a final question on that survey, “Would you be interested in helping to form a community of RSEs in the US?” Out of nearly 200 respondents, about a dozen people answered ‘yes’ and started talking. Shortly after that, the UK RSE Association sponsored the first International RSE Leaders Workshop - a meeting designed to bring together RSE team leads from across the world to connect and share experiences. Five US representatives traveled to London to participate in the workshop and left energized and committed to developing an RSE community in the US. The first US-RSE website and slack channel were formed days later. Progress was slow to start but in the ensuing months and years a formal organization emerged. For more, and to see what’s been happening recently, we invite you to read our newsletters, read more about our mission, and join the US-RSE community. A blog post that describes the road so far that has led to the present-day US-RSE can be found here.

To contact the US-RSE Association, email contact@us-rse.org.