Why Research Software Engineers & Science Gateways Creators are Important for Computational Research

Seminar abstract:
Software has become a major driver for research with over 90% of researchers answering surveys that they use software for their research and over 65% expressing that they even could not do their research without software. Science gateways are a subgroup of research software and are software frameworks for creating collaborative web portals or dashboards that support sharing of data, tools, simulations and/or workflows while hiding complex computing and data infrastructure as far as desired. This way, researchers can focus on their research questions instead of becoming acquainted to technical details. A plethora of libraries and packages have been developed enabling significant discoveries such as the gravitational waves from colliding black holes and the analyses of DNA from Next-Generation Sequencing technologies. While these discoveries are recognized world-wide for their importance, the required software or the people creating and maintaining the software to achieve them, rarely get the same recognition.
US-RSE (US Research Software Engineers Association) is working on achieving a cultural change in academia in the US to increase incentives for people being in this line of work and adapt the typical traditional academic value system with bringing in funding and publication of manuscripts. SGX3 is the NSF Center of Excellence for Science Gateways serving the science gateway community from users to providers to developers. Mature science gateway frameworks enable developers to re-use building blocks for typical tasks such as invoking simulations or sharing data. This way, a ramp up of a science gateway can be more efficient and developers can focus on the unique aspects of a science gateway that is tailored to a specific community. The presentation will go into detail for the role of research software in research and research computing and activities and opportunities US-RSE and SGX3 offer that benefit researchers and research software engineers.
Speaker Bio:
Sandra Gesing is the inaugural Executive Director of the US Research Software Engineer Association and a Senior Researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Her research focuses on science gateways, computational workflows as well as distributed and parallel computing. She is especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods and reproducibility of research results. Sustainability of research software has many facets and she advocates for improving career paths for research software engineers and facilitators and for incentivizing their work via means beyond the traditional academic rewarding system.
Before her positions at US-RSE and SDSC, she was a senior research scientist at the Discovery Partners Institute (DPI), University of Illinois System, Chicago and she was an associate research professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before she moved to the US, she was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Additionally, she has perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry in the US and Germany. As head of a system programmer group, she has long-term software projects. She received her Master’s degree in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and her PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.