We are pleased to announce the first two awardees from the EPSRC USA-UK Research Software Engineer Travel fund. This funding aims to encourage greater collaboration between the UK and USA-based Research Software Engineer communities to help with: investigating emerging hardware and the impact on software; building collaboration around a particular science area; developing common community codes; and building links between computational / computer science and mathematics. The deadline for the next round of the fund is 1st August.

Awardees

Dr Chris Richardson, EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow at the University of Cambridge BP Institute and core developer of the FEnICS software environment for finite element analysis, has been awarded money to enable the visit to the UK of Greg von Winckel, the developer of the ROL optimisation library based at Sandia National Labs. Greg will give seminars in Oxford and Cambridge to share knowledge of the current capabilities of the underlying ROL library and work with Chris and his team on code sprints to develop PyROL, a Python interface to ROL that will enable integration with FEnICS and other codes.

Dr Martin Turner, currently Relationship Manager in the University of Manchester, has had related overlapping secondments being Visualisation Director for the Harwell Imaging Partnership (HIP) at STFC/RAL and Visualisation Group Leader within the Scientific Computing Division in STFC/DL, has been awarded money to support the visit of Marcus D. Hanwell, Technical Leader at Kitware, and lead for the Tomviz (open source tomography visualisation, reconstruction) and Open Chemistry projects (open source tools for chemistry, bioinformatics, and materials science research). This will build a stronger UK-USA collaboration around the Tomographic imaging and visualisation communities given the timely start of two new research programs in the USA and UK and the existing Collaborative Computational Project in Tomographic Imaging (CCPi).

Future deadlines

Funding is still available to support the travel of RSEs between the USA and UK to share knowledge. The next deadline is the 1st August 2017, with subsequent monthly deadlines on the 1st of each month. Further details, including how to apply, can be found at the EPSRC UK-USA travel fund page.

Applications should be submitted via this form.