URSSI Welcomes Third Cohort of Early-Career Fellows
Nic Weber and Kyle Niemeyer • September 28, 2026
We are happy to announce a third cohort of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early-Career Fellowship. This cohort includes six fellows working on the following projects:
Reliable Agentic Workflows for Sustainable Multi-Language Scientific Software Interfaces - Su Sun is a postdoctoral scientific software engineer in Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University. His project will investigate whether agentic AI workflows can reliably maintain and sustain cross-language interfaces for scientific software, using the Cantera MATLAB interface as a case study. You can read more at the project website.
Call for Proposals: URSSI Early-Career Fellows
Kyle Niemeyer and Nic Weber • May 12, 2026
The US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) invites applications for an Early-Career Fellowship program.
This fellowship offers $25,000 of funding support for research in one of the following areas: AI/ML Integration in Scientific Software Development, Scientific Software Sustainability, or Software Education Research.
The fellowship is open to PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, research software engineers, and research scientists who are less than three years removed from their final degree or appointment.
Applications now open for the 2026 URSSI Summer School on Research Software Engineering
Kyle Niemeyer • April 17, 2026
Do you develop software for your research? Do you have some basic skills but desire more?
If so, you might be interested in the upcoming URSSI Summer School on Research Software Engineering. Building off our prior winter and summer schools, we are hosting a three-day workshop on research software engineering skills over 8-10 June 2026 in Boston, MA, at Northeastern University.
This is aimed at early-career researchers, particularly graduate students and postdocs, who are familiar with basic skills such as interacting with the Unix shell, version control using Git, and Python programming, and would like to learn more about best practices for developing research software.
Winter 2025 URSSI Fellowship Report: Principled Data Processing
Sam Zhang • December 9, 2025
During my time as a Winter 2025 URSSI Early-Career Fellow, I worked on making the workflow called Principled Data Processing (PDP) more accessible to academic scientists by developing a Python tool that provides a simple command-line interface for scaffolding, running, and sharing workflows based on PDP. This resulted in a funding acknowledgment for URSSI in a 2025 paper in Nature Communications where I applied PDP; a collaborative research trip to the Human Rights Data Analysis Group in San Francisco, which resulted in the spin-off project hrdag/dsg (the data-syncing gizmo); an open-sourced tool with 100% test coverage now released on on github at samzhang111/pdp; and a corresponding package on PyPI, available with pip install pdp-helper.
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