URSSI Blog

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.

URSSI Fall 2025 Fellowship: Building Sustainable Plugin Ecosystems in Scientific Software

Tim Monko • November 24, 2025

Foundational scientific software tools deliver innovative, yet reliable methods for research across multiple domains. These tools often rely on community expansion by “downstream” libraries to meet domain-specific needs. napari, an open-source, multidimensional imagee viewer for Python, provides core infrastructure for visualizing and annotating scientific imaging data. Its extendable GUI has empowered a diverse ecosystem of over 550 community-developed plugins (i.e., downstream libraries). Since the public announcement of napari in 2019 and the addition of plugin support soon after, collaboration among core contributors, plugin authors, and users has enabled research workflows that no single library could accomplish alone.