How can software help research? Researchers wanted!

The UK’s Software Sustainability Institute is on the lookout for a team of researchers to take part in its new Fellows programme to develop a better understanding of the way that software is used in research.

Each Fellow will be allocated £3,000 over 18 months to support activities that are beneficial to both the Fellow and the Institute such as travelling to conferences, or setting up and running workshops. The Institute has launched the prestigious new programme to recruit outstanding UK-based academics and researchers, who will help them gather intelligence about research and software from a whole range of subject areas.

The Software Sustainability Institute is a team of experts from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Oxford and Southampton, who are committed to cultivating world-class research through software.

The Institute team is looking for about 15 new Fellows, from PhD students to professors, who are based in a wide range of research areas that rely on software such as science, technology, digital humanities, engineering and social sciences.

The programme follows on from a successful Agents programme run over the past year by the Institute. The pilot programme saw ten Agents recruited to keep the Institute up to date with the latest software developments in their field.

“Software is now a fundamental part of research. The Software Sustainability Institute was set up in 2010 to help researchers use and develop software that is reliable, well engineered and can be re-used by different disciplines in and outside their research programmes,â€? said Simon Hettrick, the Institute’s Publicity Manager, who is based in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

“To achieve this we need to gather information from across as many research areas and software programmes as possible to see what is available, what works well and what could be used elsewhere.

“We ran the Agents programme last year and had a phenomenal amount of interest from people who wanted to take part in the programme. Over the year our Agents gathered useful intelligence that we are using to inform researchers about more sustainable research software,â€? added Simon.

Interested candidates can start applying for a Fellows place immediately and will find it advantageous to attend the official launch event at the Digital Research 2012 conference on 10 September in Oxford. Attending the launch event is free.

The launch event will be a great opportunity for potential applicants to find out more about the Fellows programme, network with like-minded researchers from across all disciplines, meet people from the Institute and discover the important role that better software can play in research.

As well as talks from Institute’s Director, Neil Chue Hong, Software Architect, Steve Crouch, and Fellows Programme leader, Shoaib Sufi, some of the Agents who took part in the pilot programme will be on hand to share their experiences.

Find out more about the Fellow Programme at: http://www.software.ac.uk/fellowship-programme

The Software Sustainability Institute is funded by the EPSRC with further funding from the JISC.