:blogpost: true :date: 2025-05-08 :author: Richard Darst :category: rse RSE report from visiting University College London Advanced Research Computing ============================================================================== Richard Darst visited UCL RSE to see what we can learn from them, and learned the following from speaking to Jonathan Cooper, the Director of Collaborations at ARC. Thanks to Jonathan for checking and improving this post. About RSE at UCL ---------------- The RSE team at UCL ("collaborations and consultancy") is part of Advanced Research Computing Centre (`ARC `__), which is a department-level organization within the university. Like Science-IT at Aalto, it is not part of their IT Services, but also not part an academic department/faculty: it's sort of their own thing. Overall, they have around 120 people, of which about 60 are in the "Collaborations Team", which is basically the RSE side of things (broader, as they have more professions, but the equivalent in type of activity as the RSE side of Science-IT). They are professional (not academic career track) staff, but ARC does have some academic affiliation which allows them to take part in academic teaching when it's needed. The actual RSE work is part of "`Collaborations and Consultancy `__" and consists of jobs titles such as Data Scientists, Data Stewards, Research Software Engineers, Digital Research Managers, and Research Infrastructure Developers. It is not that different from Aalto RSE work, but their scale means they have more emphasis on large projects. Many of their staff are assigned to various projects for months at a time (usually more than one project, but not too many - actual day-to-day time allocation is decided based on what works for each project). Many projects have a more senior and junior staff member working together, or at least aware of the work. Other sides of ARC are platforms & services (HPC and many more research-focused IT services) and teaching/training. Overall, ARC and ARC Collaborations are quite similar to Science-IT and Aalto RSE, but at a much larger and more industrial scale, capable of helping very many more people. ARC's RSE team has grown over the years. It started in 2012 with 3 posts, and by around 2016-2017 it was 8 people and began growing very rapidly. RSEs within research groups --------------------------- I was especially interested in the work of RSE within research groups (this was the original purpose of the meeting). There are several main strategies they use. * A project provides funding and ARC staff member(s) are deployed to work on the project, scheduling as it makes sense. This is the most common approach, for large and small projects. All ARC staff area are on permanent contracts because when any given project funding ends, they know there will be other projects available. This is what we have done with some flagship projects. * "Professional opportunities" - this is a special middle ground. Someone is hired as a RSE to a research group, with ARC's help in recruitment. They are paid and work within the group (with a job title such as postdoc). ARC supports their work and makes sure it goes well. After the funding is over, the person is pre-approved to join ARC permanently if they wish (assuming things have gone well, which thanks to ARC's help, they always do). * "Associate ARC membership" - people outside of ARC can become associated and be part of chat channels, meetings, internal trainings, etc. This allows others to improve their research engineering skills even without being employed by ARC. Like we have found, they think that full time permanent employment is best for professional RSE work. Short-term contracts like postdocs results in mixed motivations and constant turnover. They have scale so that they know people are always being hired, so that they can essentially promise postdocs positions when they are done. This allows higher quality candidates and for them to focus on their RSE work, not think about what (academic) job might come next. They currently (in 2025) have enough history to have approval to hire 6 new staff each year (even without knowing exactly what projects they will work on). Just like at Aalto, one can also ask "should these staff better be hired within research projects in academic departments?" And just like at Aalto, the answer is "yes, it could make sense - but these departments aren't current set up to teach, mentor, supervise, promote, and keep RSE skills." Thus it's a separate team, just like at Aalto. Lessons for Aalto ----------------- Overall, my evaluation is that if ARC is doing a lot of things right, Aalto Science-IT is doing it right too. There are implementation differences as you might expect from the different national and university environment. My thoughts for the future are: * ARC RSE began growing very rapidly after about 5 years of existence (6-8 staff/year). Aalto RSE is that point now. * Hiring RSEs to research groups is possible, but is different than hiring to a central team. It requires close cooperation and thought about their future career paths, otherwise the effect is only a bit different from a postdoc. * Research computing is different than university IT Services, I like the way UCL research computing is a different department, but practically speaking I don't think we can or should go towards that now.