Research software engineering

Research software engineering (RSE) is the professional development of software for research. The RSE team's specialists seek to boost research impact, quality, and innovation.

Use advanced or topic-specific software technologies

While critical, researchers often have little time to acquire software development expertise alongside their primary work, or to keep aware of new technologies. To support such needs, the RSE team consists of specialist software engineers with extensive research experience across topics in science, engineering, health, and life sciences, empowering researchers to:

Raise software quality or utilise emerging technologies by consulting or collaborating with us on your research or funding applications
Maximise the advantages offered by advanced computing platforms such as HPC, HTP, or cloud clusters, at Liverpool and elsewhere
Develop software engineering proficiency through training materials, workshops, and individual consultations with the RSE team
Benefit from topic-specific research networks to maximise computational researcher engagement, collaboration and teamwork across different groups at the University of Liverpool and beyond.

For further details on the University of Liverpool's computing platforms, programming languages, libraries, development guides, and substantial technical information, please see our technical documents site (intranet or VPN).

Our team

Benefiting from a growing network of partners across the RSE community and industry, team members study emerging and best practice technologies and approaches to enhance and accelerate software development. Our work focusses on building and sharing field-specific knowledge across science, engineering, and health and life sciences - supplemented by concepts in software engineering and computer science, e.g. technologies, algorithms, optimisation, and machine learning.

Our team particularly strives for software quality - frequently emerging as a concern in research software - across a familiar range of factors broadly covered in ISO 25010 Software Quality: result accuracy, functional correctness, performance, usability, maintenance, extensibility, and security.

Have questions for our team? Considering working with us? Contact us at rse-support@liverpool.ac.uk or join our mailing list for the latest RSE news and events.

Topic-specific research networks

Topic-specific research networks seek to address the common issue of isolated researchers separately tackling identical problems, perhaps even when sat at different desks in the same department. Improving researcher engagement and collaboration offers huge potential to boost research productivity, but approaches must take care to minimise any burden.

Networks are building steadily from RSE community teamwork, but we're always looking for enthusiastic people in each department to coordinate topic-specific knowledge and learning. Please get in touch if you'd like to get more involved. External academic or industrial partnerships are also most welcome, please contact us to discuss possibilities.

Workshops

Our workshops on programming skills and key technologies target local and broader research communities and aim to equip those who might subsequently leave academia for industry. We're keen to support researchers - please send your training or workshop ideas.

Share your experience

If your research has benefitted from our services, please email us at rse-support@liverpool.ac.uk to let us know. We'd love to see anything from articles and presentations, to theses and conference proceedings. This helps us to tailor our services for the future and helps us to secure funding for future facilities and projects.