URSSI Blog on Website of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute

Applications now open for the 2026 URSSI Summer School on Research Software Engineering

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

URSSI Fall Fellowship: Characterizing the Impact of LLM-Generated Code in Scientific Software

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When AI Starts Writing Scientific Software

As a multi-purpose technology, large language models (LLMs) have rapidly been integrated across industries including academia and software development. From suggesting syntax to writing full functions, they’ve transformed the possibilities for how scientists build and maintain research software.

However, the speed and convenience of LLMs comes with trade-offs. Scientific software often lives at the frontier of discovery, where a subtle bug or misused library can distort an entire analysis¹. As researchers increasingly use tools like ChatGPT or Claude to write code, we face a new question:

URSSI Welcomes Second Cohort of Early-Career Fellows

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

URSSI Welcomes Second Cohort of Early-Career Fellows

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.

Call for Proposals: URSSI Early-Career Fellows (Round 2)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) invites new applications for an Early-Career Fellowship program.

This fellowship offers funding support between $10,000 and $25,000 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 open for 2025 Reproducible Machine Learning Workflows for Scientists Workshop

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Doing interesting research can be hard, and having to carefully curate a complex software stack of tools by hand or debug why your software environment broke when it worked two days ago can make it even harder. Luckily, we don’t have to make research harder than it needs to be!

Scientific researchers need reproducible software environments for complex applications that can run across heterogeneous computing platforms. We now have modern tools for creating fully reproducible hardware accelerated software environments for machine learning workflows (and other scientific applications that use CUDA) that use high level semantics aimed at researchers!

Applications open for 2025 Summer School in Open Science + Research Software Engineering

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want your science, research, and software to be open and accessible? Do you use or develop software in your research? Do you have some foundational skills and would like to build on and expand them?

If this sounds like you, then you might be interested in the upcoming Summer School in Open Science and Research Software Engineering. In August 2025 we will be hosting a five-day workshop on open science and research software engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and organized in collaboration with the Alaska Satellite Facility and the Geophysical Institute.

URSSI Welcomes First Early-Career Fellows

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

URSSI Welcomes First Early-Career Fellows

We’re thrilled to announce the first two recipients of the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) Early-Career Fellowship. This program supports emerging researchers to advance scientific software development practices.

Meet Our Fellows

Matthew Feickert will develop an open-source course on creating reproducible software environments for scientific and AI/ML applications. His project “Reproducible Machine Learning Workflows for Scientists” will focus on using tools like Pixi to create version-controlled research environments with specialized hardware accelerator support. Matthew will organize a workshop for researchers across scientific domains and also host a tutorial on Pixi at the 2025 SciPy conference.

Call for proposals for the URSSI Early-Career Fellowship Program

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) invites applications for an Early-Career Fellowship program.

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.

Applications now open for a Summer School in Open Science + Research Software Engineering

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Do you want your science, research, and software to be open and accessible? Do you use or develop software in your research? Do you have some basic skills and would like to build on and expand them?

If this sounds like you, then you might be interested in the upcoming Summer School in Open Science and Research Software Engineering. In July 2024, we will be hosting a five-day workshop on open science and research software engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Applications now open for the 2024 URSSI Summer School in Research Software Engineering

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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 in Research Software Engineering. Building off our pilot workshop in December 2019 and a recent winter school held in January 2024, we are hosting a three-day workshop on research software engineering skills over 24–26 June 2024 in Washington, DC, on the campus of George Washington University. The GWU Open Source Program Office is co-hosting the event with URSSI.

A pathway for participation in research open source

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In planning for the University of Texas at Austin Open Source Program Office (UT-OSPO), funded by the Sloan Foundation in 2023, we worked to think about the impacts that we hoped to have on campus (and beyond).

In this effort, we were inspired by models of increasing engagement, sometimes broadly called “maturity models.” This approach helped bring together our OSPO team from across campus around the idea of a Participation Pathway.

Applications now open for the 2024 URSSI Winter School in Research Software Engineering

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 pilot workshop held back in December 2019, we are hosting a 2.5-day workshop on research software engineering skills, to be held 3-5 January 2024 in Portland, Oregon. This is aimed at early-career researchers, including graduate students and postdocs, who are familiar with the basics such as the Unix shell, version control with Git, and Python programming, and would like to learn more about best practices for developing research software.

Diversity and inclusion in research software: Insights from an international workshop

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The IEEE eScience conference in October 2023 served as the backdrop for an international participatory workshop convened by the URSSI Charting the Course project. This workshop in Cyprus facilitated a focused discussion about how to advance the field of research software. A previous blog article presented the part of this discussion that focused on career paths. Here, we delve into the second part of the discussion, which centered on diversity and inclusion in the research software field.

Diversity and inclusion in research software: Insights from an international workshop

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

What we learned about research software careers from a recent international workshop

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The URSSI Charting the Course project convened a focused participatory workshop at the IEEE eScience conference in October 2023 in Cyprus to gather international perspectives on key challenges in the research software field. At this workshop, a nuanced, in-depth discussion unfolded around the metrics and incentives that shape careers in research software internationally. This helped to clarify key issues and potential solutions that have been explored in different countries. Participating in this workshop were professionals involved in research software at different levels, including two individuals who manage large teams of research software engineers (RSEs) in different countries. The other participants were two early-career researchers working with research software and a social science PhD. These differences in participants’ profiles provided a diverse range of perspectives on the topic of advancing research software careers.

Elevate Research Software: Co-creating a Digital Roadmap

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As algorithms become the new lab assistants in contemporary research, software is no longer a sidebar—it’s the headline. The need to recognize and support software contributions has become imperative. How do we measure and extend the impact of research software? How do we integrate it into academic evaluations? One lens in which to view these types of questions is policy, which can be thought of as involving, research, organizing, and advocacy.

Introducing 'Charting the Course: Policy and Planning for Sustainable Research Software'

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hello research software community!

In this blog post, I am going to introduce myself and the research software policy project I am working on with Professor Daniel S. Katz at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign (and Principal Investigator of the project).

I am a social scientist with 20+ years of professional experience working on social, policy and institutional aspects of science and technology. I am now working as a Visiting Research Scientist for the U.S. Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) policy project at NCSA, as part of a two-year award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.