Nic Weber and Kyle Niemeyer
September 23, 2025
We are happy to announce a second cohort of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early-Career Fellowship. This cohort includes three projects and five fellows working on the follwoing:
Characterizing LLM-Generated Code in Scientific Software - Shahan Ali Memon, David Farr, and Eva Maxfield Brown will investigate the detection of AI assisted development in code repositories that are linked to scientific articles. Their project will evaluate existing methods used for detection (e.g. code stylometry), create a dataset of verified AI/non-AI assisted code, and assess how adoption changes code quality, documentation practices, and reproducibility.
Sustainable Practices in Napari’s Plugin Ecosystem - Timothy Monko will modernize the Napari plugin development infrastructure, and develop processes and procedures to better coordinate developers contributing plugins. Tim’s work will also help Napari modernize its plugin documentation and adopt Python standards.
Sustaining Public Health Research Infrastructure in County Health Rankings & Roadmaps - Hannah Olson-Williams is working on migrating CHR&R program code to a sustainable R package. Having lost funding for this project, Hannah is building upon exceptionally well documented data infrastructure to make this public health information accessible to a broad base of reseachers and practitioners around the USA.
We’re excited to bring these three projects into the URSSI early-career program, and continue working with highly-motivated scientists who take their software seriously.
URSSI plans to issue one additional call for proposals to the fellowship program early in 2026. We are seeking projects focused on AI/ML integration in scientific software, software sustainability best practices, and software education research - but if you have a project that you think would be a good fit please be in touch.