Call for Research Software Champions - January 2024
Become an Imperial Research Software Champion!
Inspire and train your peers to write better research software and promote their work!
Are you an Imperial PhD student? Do you write software as part of your research? Are you passionate about using version control, testing and other best practices to help you effectively maintain your code? Do you want to help your peers and colleagues to improve the quality of their software outputs?
Why not consider applying to become an Imperial Research Software Champion?!
We are looking for a group of around 12 Imperial PhD students to participate in our 2024 “Research Software Champions” cohort. This is part of a project on open research and enhancing research software culture within Imperial.
We aim to build a diverse team of enthusiastic researchers who would like to inspire and engage their peers with new and interesting technical topics, tools and ideas. We'd like our cohort to include Champions from across the College’s faculties and departments. Champions will plan and undertake activities to help raise the profile of research software and software development best practices within the research community at Imperial. This would be for a fixed period up to the end of July 2024 and we have funds to cover these activities for a few hours per month for each student, during this period.
Your experience
It is likely that you:*
- Have a strong interest in the use of software to support/undertake research.
- Have experience of writing code in one or more languages as part of your current research at Imperial or through previous work.
- Are already an experienced user of a version control system such as Git.
- Have familiarity with writing documentation, software testing and related practices such as Continuous Integration (CI).
- Have experience of presenting research and technical material to other researchers.
* If you work in a field where there is less familiarity with software development skills and associated best practices and you’re concerned that you may not have sufficient technical skills or experience for the role, do consider applying anyway as there are opportunities for us to provide assistance through training and mentoring. A very important aspect of the role is enthusiasm for the area and a desire to help make a difference in how researchers build software.
What do we ask from you?
We’d like you to prepare, advertise and run two interactive community sessions for researchers in your department and, potentially, from related fields at Imperial, as well as acting as an advocate for good quality research software. The sessions that you run may take the form of training workshops, seminars, community get-togethers or other types of activity that you feel will benefit members of your department. We’d also ask that you engage with the existing research software community at Imperial through our Slack workspace and events.
The sessions that you run will help researchers understand why software best practices are so important in modern research and highlight how they can help to ensure robust, sustainable, reliable software that produces reproducible outputs - all key aspects that both funders and publishers are looking for when assessing proposals or papers relating to research that has a strong software element. You will drive the process of organising and running the events but support will be available from the project team.
We’ll expect you to spend a total of about 50 hours of time on these activities spread over the period between February and July 2024.
If your PhD is partly or fully funded by a commercial partner or EU funding (Horizon Europe), please advise us of this when completing the application form in case it presents any potential IP or other conflicts. It is important for us to verify with you that undertaking the role of Research Software Champion won’t present any conflicts with your PhD work.
What’s in it for you?
The time you spend on this activity (about 50 hours in total) will be paid at an hourly rate of £30, (based on Imperial’s higher student demonstrator rate for 2023/24).
In addition, some of the benefits of becoming a research software champion include:
- A chance to meet and work with other PhD students from across College who are interested in research software.
- An opportunity to raise your profile as someone who cares about supporting the development of high quality, sustainable research outputs
- A chance to meet members of the Research Computing Service’s Research Software Engineering team.
- An opportunity to develop links and build your network across Imperial, working with people from a range of different academic and central College departments.
How to apply:
Please confirm with your PhD supervisor / line manager that they are happy for you to apply for this opportunity.
You can apply by completing this form. The deadline for applications is 23:59 on Monday 19th February 2024 (extended deadline).
If you have any questions about this opportunity, please contact Jeremy Cohen, jeremy.cohen@imperial.ac.uk.