On the 31st of January we are hosting 2 research software engineers from the Imperial RSE team to talk about making the journey from PhD to RSE, as well as what the team does.
The abstracts of their talks are below.
Dr Ryan Smith : “From Bioinformatics to Research Software Engineer”
In this talk I will share my personal journey from a PhD in Bioinformatics to my current role as Research Software Engineer. Initially driven by a passion for mass spectrometry-based proteomics and cell signalling, I soon discovered that the skills I developed in analysing complex biological datasets could be applied to other fields, and that I could have a great impact on research across disciplines.
This talk may of interest to those who are considering careers outside of the traditional route in academia, or perhaps those who simply have an interest in research software engineering. I will be including some of the challenges and rewards I experienced in both career paths, and why I personally decided RSE work was the right path for me.
Dr Diego Alonso Álvarez: “Supporting excellence in research software at Imperial”
The Research Software Engineering team, part of the Research Computing Service within ICT, was born in 2017 with the mission of increasing the quality, impact and sustainability of the research software developed at Imperial, supporting the College in enhancing its world-leading research outputs. This has crystalised over the years in a number of projects with researchers across all faculties and most departments, small and large scale ones.
In this talk, we will present the different ways of collaborating with the RSE team, both free and paid for services, as well as showcase a few examples of existing projects we are working on or have work in the past. We will also present the new Research Software Directory a portal that we aim to setup as the single place where all software developed at Imperial can be promoted.
This will be hosted in person at the Hammersmith campus in the Commonwealth building, subbasement room 12A (current building access issues permitting). We will broadcast on Teams as well.
The Biomedical Data Science Seminar Series (BDS3, formerly MDR-Bioinformatics meetup) are hosted by the section of Bioinformatics of the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction. BDS3 hosts researchers from within the section, Imperial and outside Imperial to give talks on data science (machine/deep learning, bioinformatics, chemometrics, software engineering) with focus on biomedical applications. These seminars are attended by academics, postdocs, PhD, MRes/MSc and BSc students and are hosted either in person at the Hammersmith Campus, via MS Teams or in hybrid mode on alternate Wednesdays from 12:00-13:00 through the academic year. The format is dependent on the speaker preferences, but with one speaker the talks are typically 30-40 mins with 20-30 min Q&A, and with 2 speakers the talks are 15-20 mins with 10-15 min Q&A for each. The organisers are Prof Tim Ebbels, Dr Joram Posma, Dr Gopal Dhondalay and Dr Dezso Modos.