URSSI Blog

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.

Winter 2025 URSSI Fellowship Report: Reproducible Machine Learning Workflows for Scientists

Matthew Feickert • November 17, 2025

During my Winter 2025 URSSI Early-Career Fellowship project, I researched how modern technologies and tools can assist researchers in easily creating fully reproducible hardware accelerated software environments for scientific and machine learning workflows. I compiled the techniques and best practices I had learned into a short course, which I contributed to The Carpentries Incubator, and then taught this open source educational material to the broader scientific community at workshops.

The material focused on using Pixi — a modern multi-platform software environment manager that builds on the conda and Python package ecosystems — and CUDA conda packages distributed on conda-forge. Pixi is a tool with high-level semantics designed to let users declaratively specify project software requirements and then record the fully resolved (“locked”) dependencies in a “lock file”. Written in Rust, Pixi exploits the language’s speed and technologies to efficiently resolve complex dependency trees and update the project lock file for every Pixi operation that could affect the software environment. This means that that if a Pixi project is version controlled, any state of that project is fully reproducible, byte for byte, indefinitely into the future.

Applications now open for the 2025 URSSI Winter School in Research Software Engineering

Kyle Niemeyer • November 5, 2025

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 Winter School in Research Software Engineering. Building off our prior winter and summer schools, we are hosting a three-day workshop on research software engineering skills over 15–17 December 2025 in Portland, OR, at Oregon State University’s Portland Center.

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.