University of Manchester digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) are invited to attend an in-person workshop on Friday 16 January. Participants will have the opportunity to connect with other dRTPs, hear about dRTP roles and career development at UoM, and discuss and strategise how UoM can better support dRTP roles (including Research Software Engineers, Data Stewards, Data Engineers, Platforms Engineers).

The University of Manchester's Department of Physics & Astronomy is seeking a Senior Research Software Engineer. The successful candidate will hold a position of leadership in software engineering and sustainable software development, and drive a FAIR and energetically efficient computational research program impacting major research infrastructures for particle physics, astronomy and beyond.

The role is varied and interesting and you will be working in an engaging and supportive interdisciplinary environment that will help you develop as an individual while allowing you to be productive and use your abilities to develop excellent software within the European-funded EVERSE project. You will be one of the leading actors deploying and disseminating best practices of software excellence among other researchers who code in all European Science Clusters.

The deadline to apply is Thursday 10 October.

University of Manchester’s Research IT and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) have been funded by NERC (grant NE/X009181/1, “Software Development for Earth and Environmental Scientists: Reproducible Research through Reusable, Reliable Code”) for the second consecutive year to deliver the course on intermediate research software skills for Earth sciences. The course will be delivered at an in-person workshop in Manchester, from 18-22 March 2024. 

The course helps researchers improve their existing computational research practices within the context of Earth, atmospheric and oceanic sciences, covering the following topics:

• Tools and practices for code development, testing, debugging and sharing (including using virtual and integrated development environments, Git and GitHub, and command line tools)
• Verifying software correctness (automated and at scale)
• Programming and software architecture design paradigms for engineering software
• Coding conventions, documenting code and code review for improved software readability, accessibility, correctness and quality
• Best practices in collaboratively developing, releasing, maintaining and supporting software for improved reusability and sustainability

The workshop will consist of instructor-led coding-along sessions, individual self-learning sessions aided by helpers, and small-group exercises mimicking working on real-life collaborative software projects. There will also be opportunities to apply the skills taught to learners’ own projects. We are hoping to emulate the success of and improve upon the first pilot of the course from 2023.

The applications for attending the workshop have now been closed, but if you are interested in hearing more about the course - please get in touch with Anja Le Blanc (University of Manchester) or Aleksandra Nenadic (SSI’s Training Lead).

Two positions have opened at the eScience Lab, the research group led by Professor Carole Goble at the department of Computer Science, University of Manchester in the UK. The Lab is focused on research and development of tools designed for data driven and computational research.