US Research Software Sustainability Institute
URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.
Learn more about our mission and vision
URSSI's mission is to improve the recognition , development, and use of software for a more sustainable research enterprise.
Learn more about our mission and visionKeep up to date with URSSI's new activities
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.
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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.
Stay tuned for upcoming announcements on workshops, training events, conferences and more.
As we get started on the institue, we have launched a series of core projects to improve the sustaniability of research software and the people who produce it.
This EAGER project will investigate the development and maintenance of software produced in research projects funded by the National Science Foundation. The goals of this project are: 1 To understand what factors influence software sustainability by gathering data from grant-funded research projects; 2 To describe current models of sustainability planning and suggest potential new models that could increase the likelihood of achieving long-term software sustainability; and 3 To develop new …
As part of a set of connected activities under the banner of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute, this grant funds an effort by Kyle Niemeyer, Associate Professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, to develop and run four, weeklong “beyond introductory” winter/summer schools for researchers who want to deepen their software engineering skills. Beyond directly training researchers in sustainable software development, Niemeyer will develop, hone, and release a …
Welcome to “Charting the Course: Policy and Planning for Sustainable Research Software,” a Sloan Foundation-funded project dedicated to supporting the future of research software through evidence-informed policy work. This section will help you stay updated with our latest news, research, and community engagement activities.
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