Day 1: Tuesday 28 April, 11:10 - 11:50
Session 1.1 - CarpentriesOffline miniHPC Hackathon
- Jannetta Steyn, Newcastle University
This lightning talk is an opportunity to give feedback on the CarpentriesOffline miniHPC hackathon that will take place from 14 to 16 April 2026. The hackathon is funded by the SSI Further Development Fund and SocRSE Events and Initiatives funding. This is a golden opportunity to show how these funds help to strengthen the RSE community both in terms of collaboration and upskilling.
Session 1.2 - Fortran index: Facilitating better knowledge exchange within the Fortran community
- Joe Wallwork, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge
Many high quality learning resources and tools have been developed for the Fortran programming language over its seven decades of usage. However, their visibility is generally poor in the community. In this lightning talk, I'll describe how the Fortran index hackathon series is facilitating better sharing of knowledge by adding to, correcting, and curating the information presented in the fortran-lang community resource.
Session 1.3 - The Green RSE Special Interest Group
- Joe Wallwork, Institute of Computing for Climate Science, University of Cambridge
The Green RSE Special Interest Group (SIG) aims to build a supportive, collaborative community of RSEs and researchers who code, to work together on understanding how to reduce the environmental impact of research software. This lightning talk will give an outline of the aims of the SIG and what's been achieved since it was established in 2024. We'll also discuss the focus of current and future efforts, as well as how interested attendees can get involved.
Session 1.4 - ConveRSE - Reflections on a year of talking about mental health in the research software community
- Mike Simpson, Newcastle University
Mike will discuss some of the things he's learned during his fellowship, promote the ConveRSE website and encourage people to submit blog posts and other contributions.
Session 1.5 - Bridging Technical and Policy Communities in Research Software
- Goodnews Sandy, Open Science Community Saudia Arabia, The Turing Way
Research Software Engineers (RSEs) tend to focus on system efficiency, scalability, and interoperability, while policy actors prioritise trust, accountability, legality, and public value. When these two communities operate in silos, initiatives risk being technically sound but socially misaligned or policy-compliant but technically unworkable. Bridging this gap isn’t optional; it’s the difference between systems that work on paper and systems that work for people. In this lightning talk, Goodnews will spark collaborative ideas and conversation that transform the friction between these two worlds into a practical framework that enables effective, human-centred software projects.
Session 1.6 - Enhancing Open Research at The University of Manchester through collaboration
- Phil Reed, The University of Manchester
A summary of the impact following the intersection of two fellowship programmes: The University of Manchester Office for Open Research and the Software Sustainability Institute. The two authors have each become fellows of both organisations and taken independent yet inter-related paths. We describe how their activities have fostered equitable and diverse collaboration, through the support of digital research technical professional (dRTP) career development, at local and national level.
Session 1.7 - Using Co-design Workshops to Collaboratively Improve Computing Carbon Calculators
- Christina Bremer, University of Cambridge
Computing carbon calculators are an important tool to empower researchers to quantify and visualise the environmental impacts of their computations. To improve the usability of these calculators and better communicate their complexities and underlying calculations, we conducted two online co-design workshops with both experts and users – using our own Green Algorithms calculator as an example. In this talk, Christina will give a brief overview of the workshops and initial results, which can help inform the design, development, and use of computing carbon calculators within the RSE community.
Session 1.8 - Yet Another Git Course (YAGC) aka Git for Researchers
- Hui Ling Wong, Imperial College London
The talk will introduce a Git course designed for researchers, offering practical, research-focused guidance on using Git. Rather than simply teaching commands, it emphasizes the workflows that make version control meaningful in a research context. The talk will reflect on what worked and what didn’t in developing the course, and highlight it as a resource for anyone looking to reach researchers who may not yet be familiar with version control - explaining both why it matters and how it can be useful.
Session 1.9 - Different pathways for paid and volunteer contributors to The Turing Way?
- Esther Plomp, University of Aruba
This lightning talk will give a short update about a research study on the experiences of volunteer and paid contributors to The Turing Way community - exploring what 'being paid' entails for The Turing Way community members, and how (financial) compensation may influence the community dynamics. The talk will highlight the stage 1 registered report submission and either provide preliminary results or ask for feedback on the study (pending on the review status of the submission).
Session 1.10 - The Non-Linear Research Professional: How Fellowship Funding Can Turn Exploration into Progression
- Sorrel Harriet, Leeds University
Like many in Research Software Engineering, I didn't plan to be here—I just wanted to keep learning, follow my interests, and experience variety. Over seven years, SSI Fellowship and Follow-on Fellowship funding have supported me on my journey, and, more importantly, have helped me turn scattered experiences into something that makes sense and offers real value to the research software community.
Session 1.11 - CHTLab's work on research software for ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies on cognition and health
- Mario Bermonti-Pérez, Ponce Health Sciences University
This talk will highlight research software developed at the Cognition, Health, and Technology Lab to support ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies aimed at improving cognition and health in Spanish- and English-speaking populations. We are building cross-platform mobile applications and an ecosystem to simplify the development of high-quality research applications. Our goal is to foster international collaborations and to continue fostering diversity and inclusion in the research software community, as our work is led by Spanish-speaking Hispanics in Puerto Rico (Caribbean).
Session 1.12 - (ChatG)PlaceboT: do you need an AI chatbot or just a rubber duck?
- Sadie Bartholomew, National Centre for Atmospheric Science and University of Reading
This talk aims to highlight the significance of 'rubber duck debugging' (problem solving by explaining the issue clearly in plain language to another party, traditionally typified by a rubber duck) in the usefulness of AI chatbots for (research) software engineering. Whilst AI chatbot responses can be very helpful, simply the act of comprehending the nature of a problem precisely (in debugging or otherwise) by elucidating the details to create the query can lead to solutions, which questions the need to use such tools in the first place, notable for sustainability given the substantial carbon footprint of the LLMs that power them. I propose that we could create a toy tool '(ChatG)PlaceboT' which plays with this idea by providing a similar UI to a popular AI chatbot but only producing a static list of responses (so having minimal carbon cost) which encourage further elaboration of the details of the problem at hand.
Day 2: Wednesday 29 April, 14:00 - 14:50
Session 2.1 - Can NRENs Bridge Asian and Global Research Software Communities?
- Jyoti Satnam Singh Bhogal, RSE Asia Association
Research software across Asia often exists under different titles and practices, making community building and career recognition fragmented. Building on my SSI Fellowship 2025 work, I am exploring how National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), such as APAN, can act as focal points for strengthening and connecting research software communities in the region. This lightning talk will share early insights from ongoing conversations and reflect on how UK and international RSE community practices have informed this work.
Session 2.2 - Building an Open-Source Community around the DIRECT Framework
- Adrian D'Alessandro, Imperial College London
This lightning talk will be introducing Adrian and his SSI Fellowship plans. The fellowship goal is to increase the number of open-source contributors to the DIRECT Framework web-app. He will use this talk to ask for advice and connections.
Session 2.3 - The Finnish RSE community
- Samantha Wittke, CSC - IT Center for Science
Samantha's 2025 SSI fellowship is/was about community building of RSEs in Finland and the Nordics. The fellowship enabled her to participate in international RSE council, the international RSE survey and organize several activities for the Finnish RSE community, such as a international RSE day lunch and later a meetup. With this lightning talk she would like to share her experiences and outcomes of the fellowship.
Session 2.4 - Seeds to Systems: sustaining research projects by sustaining researchers
OLS introduces Seeds to Systems, our new research, training, and community incubation strategy in which sustainability and leadership are taking the spotlight. Our three pillars are interlinked: Training sets researchers up for community projects, incubation supports early-stage initiatives through often-painful setup stages (like what to do if you get your first grant!), and research underpins it all: ensuring there is an evidence base for kind, effective open community management. Let's collaborate together!
Session 2.5 - Building Sustainable Research Software Communities When Resources Are Uneven
- Laura Ondari, Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya initiative (BHKI)/ International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)
Drawing on the Bioinformatics Hub of Kenya initiative (BHKi), this lightning talk reflects on what it takes to sustain peer-led research software communities in contexts shaped by limited funding, infrastructure constraints, and volunteer labour. It highlights practical approaches to maintaining engagement, trust, and momentum beyond workshops and events, with lessons that are transferable across global research software ecosystems.
Session 2.6 - Understanding Executive Dysfunction: Designing Support for the RSE Community
- William Haese-Hill, University of Glasgow
William will briefly introduce his SSI Fellowship project, which aims to understand how executive dysfunction can affect participation and wellbeing in the RSE community, particularly across remote and hybrid ways of working. He'll outline his plan to gather evidence via a community survey, and invite ideas and collaborators to help shape the work and identify practical, inclusive interventions we can trial and share.
Session 2.7 - Upskilling Researchers at NOC: What works, what doesn’t and what next?
- Esther Turner, National Oceanography Centre
At the National Oceanography Centre, over the last 18 months, we (the Software Engineering and AI team) have been running a series of training workshops. These are aimed primarily at our researchers, with the aim of upskilling them in coding, software development and computational skills. Now that we’ve got quite a lot of experience at this, I’d like to (very!) briefly reflect on what has worked well for us, what we wouldn’t do again and where we might go from here. Hopefully this will be useful to others running (or contemplating) a major training effort at their institutions and I’d love to spark discussions over the course of the conference about everyone’s experiences in this space so that we can all learn from each other.
Session 2.8 - Green DiSC, 2 years on
- Anica Araneta, University of Cambridge
Hosted by the SSI and launched in 2024, Green DiSC provides a roadmap for research groups and institutions who want to tackle the environmental impacts of their computing activities. As the first free and open-access sustainability certification scheme, it has grown quickly to 132 groups and central teams enrolled across the UK, Europe, and Australia, and now 15 teams have successfully completed the Bronze level certification. This lightning talk will summarise the scheme’s relevance to researchers in the SSI community, cover the various ways to get involved, and touch on lessons in community building and running a first-of-its-kind certification scheme.
Session 2.9 - Building a Data Science Platform for 100s of researchers
- Colin Sauze, National Oceanography Centre
This talk will cover experiences at the National Oceanography Centre of building a Data Science Platform based on JupyterHub. This has been deployed this on-prem, in JASMIN/STFC cloud and on commercial cloud providers. It has proven very popular with our researchers and for running training workshops.
Session 2.10 - Creative computation (and what art can teach us about software)
- Anne Lee Steele, Studio Sanshin
What does creative computation have to do with software sustainability? This talk is a speed through the world of creative computation - boiled down into two minutes! Creative computation lives at the edges of software making and makers: in live coding, generative art, experimental tools, and playful hacking. It asks challenging questions about our tools and ourselves. This talk is a zoom through the creative computation, a 'mental map' of the ecosystem and how creativity can help us to think differently about software in the institutions we are a part of.
