RCT #180 - Fundability and Staffability. Plus: Successes and Struggles of Horizon 2020; Research Management as a profession; RSE Competencies; NASA Transform to Open Science; Infrastructure for Research on Teaching; CaRCC Engagement Guide for Smaller Institutions
For the last four issues we’ve been walking our way around the flywheel of research computing teams, looking at the external forces tugging on our teams — today I’ll want to talk about the internal forces acting on us.
But first let’s look at what those external arrows have in common.
I’ve drawn the arrows as pointing in different directions, representing the different stakeholders (our individual researcher clients; research in our community as a whole; and our supporting clients, the institutional and external funders).
The fantastic news is, though, all of those forces are actually pulling us in the same direction.
- It’s not enough that some diffuse population of researchers kinda, sorta like our services — we need to offer services that actual individual researchers care enough about to phone VPRs or CIOs or program officers to advocate for support and/or services that they are willing to write into their grants. (#178)
- It’s not enough that our efforts result in some vaguely positive outcome (#173) - they have to have high research impact per unit investment, as high or higher than anything else that could have been done with the funds we use (#177). As a result,
- It’s not enough that we can explain in the abstract to our decision maker stakeholders what we do; we need to demonstrate to them that we are an excellent investment of scarce research funding dollars because we have unusually high and understandable impact per unit of investment, and we need to voice this consistently and often (#178)
All of these constraints are orienting us towards one requirement: that we ensure our teams are fundable. Our teams are fundable when continuously allocating money to our teams is something that named researchers care specifically and vociferously about, and is something our funders feel confident about, because we’re consistently and demonstrably enabling disproportionately high research impact per unit money invested.
So if that’s the big external constraint on our teams, what are the internal constraints?
When I’m talking to leaders of technical research support teams, there’s one topic that always comes up very quickly after funding — and that’s hiring and retaining staff.
The people working on our teams are extremely intelligent, capable, and self-motivated experts, people who could find a job paying twice as much in industry within the space of two or three months if they chose to. But they highly value the world of academic research. In fact, they probably had the opportunity to stay on the research track longer than they did. However, they bore easily, prefer technical work to applying for funding and writing papers, and very much enjoy to be able to go from project to project, learning new domain science as well as technical skills as they do so. That’s how they end up on our teams.
So while the big external forces require us to make sure our team is fundable, our big internal forces require something of us if we’re going to have a staffed team to fund at all. Our team needs work that:
- Allows people to see the direct impact of their work on their community’s research
- Allows people to work on different kinds of projects and learn new things
- Allows people to get better and better at something
- Does not require heroic effort
- Requires as little gruntwork or repetitive work as possible
- Gives senior people a chance to have wide impact and a range of projects
- Gives junior staff clear paths to career growth and advancement
So here’s where we’re just unbelievably fortunate, much more so than other expertise-based businesses like management consultancies. Because the overlap between these two parts of the Venn diagram is enormous; our staff by and large want the same things required of us by external constraints.
- The funders want to see demonstrable high impact, and our team members also want to see their particular work have real and important research significance.
- Our researchers have a number of different kinds of needs, and our staff want to grow their skills and learn new things.
- We need to deliver our offerings effectively and efficiently, and our staff want to get better at doing things, don’t want to be faffing about with repetitive or unnecessary work, nor reinventing wheels, nor to have heroics required of them to get something over the finish line.
So by and large we want to structure the work our team takes on in a way that allows us to pick an area in which we're going to become very good, to be fairly nimble about how we offer services and products in that area to researcher clients whose projects will greatly benefit from our contribution, and to have high impact in as efficient a way as possible.
I've talked about doing this before, especially in #157. Our work and our team and our fundability benefit from putting together a system where we can leverage existing skills, knowledge gained from projects done from researchers, and documented and communciated success stories into an ongoing practice. Over time, that looks like this slide below which always generates a lot of discussion when I show it:
That is, we develop the processes by which we can take the existing expertise of our team, systematically grow it and leverage it with standard operating practices and automation, and bundle it into things that we know that researchers value, that will lead more often than not to successfull research projects and research impact, and will let us communicate that impact to our sustaining clients in our institutions and funders. Which is to say now we're back at the diagram that we started with 10 weeeks ago:
Next issue I'll talk a little bit about how, once we've got this down, we can make it easier for ourselves and others to communicate what we do. Two very scary words - positioning and marketing.
And on that dire note, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals and Teams
Over in The Other Place, Manager, Ph.D., in issue #172 I talked about how individual productivity is, for our kinds of teams especially, not really what we care about.
Also covered in the roundups were articles on:
- Coaching a team member towards deciding
- Unlocking team performance
- Decision transparency for stakeholders
- Paying attention to the next larger context
- Working in your best environment
The Research Ecosystem
In review: The successes and shortcomings of Horizon 2020 - Thomas Brent & Goda Naujokaitytė
It’s always worth reading reviews of funding programs to see how funders and those that decide on their funding to see what matters to them. This article in Science|Business summarize a European Commission evaluation of the Horizon 2020 program. Yes, papers and citations matter, but there were other measures that Horizon 2020 was measured against:
- Commercial impact - turnover and total assets for participating firms, patents and trademarks
- Building capacity by funding work in countries that don’t get as much research funding (“Closing the EU’s R&I gap”)
- Closing a well-documented research funding gender gap
- Within-Europe mobility of people
- Open access publications
- Social impact like COVID-19 research
- Dissemination and deployment of results
Funders (institutional or national/supranational) will tell you what they care about (#75), and the more we can help them advance their goals, the more support we can start seeing for ours.
‘Very positive’ national support for research management - Nina Bo Wagner
I find it heartening that after years of seeing nothing, there’s starting to be broad support for a professionalization of management in our professions. Here, Wagner summarizes a panel discussion of some work being done as part of the RM Roadmap effort in Europe. That effort defines Research Managers (RM) as
…including research policy advisers, research managers, financial support staff, data stewards, research infrastructure operators, knowledge transfer officers, business developers, knowledge brokers, innovation managers, legal and research contracts managers/professionals, etc. For simplicity, we use the term research management, but this exercise covers also other terms such as research support, research management and administration, professionals at the interface of science and other terms which are used as the norm in the national landscapes across Europe.
And yes RMs aren’t a great name. In the UK, for instance, they’re looking for a better name and title.
Research Software Development
Foundational Competencies and Responsibilities of a Research Software Engineer - Goth et al, arXiv:2311.11457v2
I didn’t report on this when it first came out - there’s a somewhat reorganized up v2 of the manuscript now, describing a set of competencies for RSEs at what I think is the right level of abstraction. (That’s no small praise! The hardest part about such an effort in as diverse a field as any kind of technical research support is considering the problem at a high enough level to be able to apply widely while remaining grounded enough to still be able to make meaningful distinctions. Some efforts in our line of work have struggled with this).
- Software/technical souks
- Software lifecycle
- Documented code building blocks
- Distributable libraries
- Use software repositories
- Software behaviour awareness and analysis
- Research skills
- Curiosity
- Understanding the research cycle
- Software re-use
- Software publication and citation
- Using domain-science specific repositories/directories
- Communications sklils
- Working in a team
- Teaching
- Project management
- Interaction with users and other stakeholders
This is a really nice framework.
NASA Transform To Open Science (TOPS)
Ah, and I had missed this, too - NASA's long had a commitment to practicing open science themselves, but with TOPS, they are putting together a curriculum, tools, and resources for the practice of Open Science more broadly. I'll be keeping an eye on this.
Research Data Management and Analysis
US agency allocates $90m to education research infrastructure - Craig Nicholson, Research Professional News
NSF invests $90M in innovative national scientific cyberinfrastructure for transforming STEM education - NSF News
This is interesting - digital research infrastructure to help researchers (and industry) study and improve things for one of the other missions of our institutions, education.
From the NSF announcement:
SafeInsights aims to serve as a central hub, facilitating research coordination and leveraging data across a range of major digital learning platforms that currently serve tens of millions of U.S. learners across education levels and science, technology, engineering and mathematics. With its controlled and intuitive framework, unique privacy-protecting approach and emphasis on the inclusion of students, educators and researchers from diverse backgrounds, SafeInsights will enable extensive, long-term research on the predictors of effective learning, which are key to academic success and persistence. […] Because progress in science, technology and innovation increasingly relies on advanced research infrastructure — including equipment, cyberinfrastructure, large-scale datasets and skilled personnel — this Mid-scale RI-2 investment [led by OpenStax at Rice University: LJD] will allow researchers to delve into deeper and broader scientific inquiries than ever before
One of the things I like about these mission-driven projects is that they inherently cut across what are the traditional DRI silos - there’s necessarily elements of research computing, research data/research data management, and research software development integrated into this. Here the privacy requirements make the research data management aspects primary, but the product wouldn’t work without research computing and research software expertise.
Research Computing Systems
Engagement Facilitation Guide for Smaller and Emerging RCD Programs - Daphne McCanse
CaRCC Capabilities Model Focused Tools Engagement Guide and Script - John Nicks, Forough Ghahramani, et al
Ah, this is nice - I’m a big fan of the CaRCC Capabilities model, but it’s an awful lot for a smaller institution to even know how to start with. This is a guide to engage with smaller institutions to help them come up with a plan for mapping out their capabilities. It could be used for someone coming in from the outside, or for the institution itself.
More broadly, it’s a nice guide to mapping out and engaging with key decision makers and stakeholders at an institution for any purpose.
Random
Fascinating look from quite some time ago on spreadsheet errors in the context of broader human error research: Thinking Is Bad.
The case for naming your handful of utility scripts starting with a comma.
Another introduction to differentiable programming: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland.
MS-DOS 4.0 is now open sourced.
That’s it…
And that’s it for another week. If any of the above was interesting or helpful, feel free to share it wherever you think it’d be useful! And let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share about the newsletter or stewarding and leading our teams. Just email me, or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox.
Have a great weekend, and good luck in the coming week with your research computing team,
Jonathan
About This Newsletter
Research computing - the intertwined streams of software development, systems, data management and analysis - is much more than technology. It’s teams, it’s communities, it’s product management - it’s people. It’s also one of the most important ways we can be supporting science, scholarship, and R&D today.
So research computing teams are too important to research to be managed poorly. But no one teaches us how to be effective managers and leaders in academia. We have an advantage, though - working in research collaborations have taught us the advanced management skills, but not the basics.
This newsletter focusses on providing new and experienced research computing and data managers the tools they need to be good managers without the stress, and to help their teams achieve great results and grow their careers.
Jobs Leading Research Computing Teams
This week’s new-listing highlights are below in the email edition; the full listing of 135 jobs is, as ever, available on the job board.
Associate Director Platform Services Infrastructure - Northwestern University, Evanston IL USA
The Associate Director of Platform Services in Cyberinfrastrucure works closely with Research Computing Services to lead the teams responsible for Northwestern’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure, a suite of resources that includes Quest, an HPC system with more than 65,000 cores, used by Northwestern researchers to make cutting-edge discoveries through computational research and data science, and The Research Data Storage Service (RDSS), Northwestern’s dedicated research storage platform housed at the University’s central data centers, providing a secure, reliable, and stable environment designed to meet researchers’ needs.
Director of Research Software Engineering, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis - University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA USA
The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) is a world leader in environmental data science, and has helped to stimulate and promote open data science research worldwide since our inception in 1995. As the Director of Research Software Engineering, you will lead independent environmental data science research at NCEAS to envision, design, develop, analyze and operate a national software infrastructure for open data management, analysis, modeling, and visualization. Independent software engineering research activities will focus on novel approaches to data science to enable open and reproducible science and facilitate synthetic research.
Head of Digital, iNetZ+ Global Research Institute - Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh UK
As the Head of Digital, you will lead the development and implementation of digital twin technologies within our Impact Engineering function, overseeing a team of digital specialists and engineers, your role will focus on advancing the use of digital replicas for complex systems and processes to optimise their performance and efficiency. You will play a pivotal role in steering the institute’s digital strategy, fostering industry partnerships, and promoting the adoption of digital twins across multiple sectors. Your expertise in digital technologies, along with strategic leadership, will ensure the successful delivery of innovative solutions that align with our overarching mission.
MS-CC Director of Cyberinfrastructure Programs - Internet2, Remote US
The MS-CC is searching for an enthusiastic, collaborative and dynamic leader to direct its programmatic activities focused on Cyberinfrastructure, with the primary focus areas being the Proof-of Concept Grant (PoCG) program and Cyberinfrastructure Facilitation Services.“ This MS-CC Director of Cyberinfrastructure Programs will collaborate with faculty, staff, and students at HBCUs and TCUs to develop and implement a strategic plan for the PoCG program. with the primary goal of making a significant, positive difference in the awareness, access, and use of cyberinfrastructure resources for research at HBCUs and TCUs. The Director will also work with MS-CC’s Climate Science Program staff to develop and implement a cohesive strategy that advances the full portfolio of the MS-CC’s cyberinfrastructure programs.
Manager, AI Enablement - Macquarie University, Sydney NSW AU
A newly created AI Enablement team within IT will play a crucial role in integrating AI solutions across various faculties and departments, driving forward the University's strategic objectives. The team will develop, implement and support AI initiatives and projects across the University, encouraging innovation and enhancing academic and operational excellence through the application of artificial intelligence technologies. The Manager, AI Enablement, will be responsible for leading the establishment of the University's AI enablement capabilities, in line with leading best practices and frameworks. This role will work closely with the IT senior leadership team, as well as key stakeholders in BIR Analytics, OGC, DVC-A, DVC-R, and faculties, and will be responsible for managing the AI Working Group and supporting the AI Advisory Taskforce.
Associate Director, Digitial Research Infrastructure - Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane QL AU
Do you want to use your strong digital leadership skills to help solve some of the worlds most pressing challenges? QUT is seeking a dynamic and experienced leader to provide strategic planning and operational excellence in our digital research infrastructure. While technical expertise will be important, the successful candidate will focus on relationship management with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders. You will support QUT researchers, and our research partners, to accelerate their ambition through the delivery of seamless, sustainable and high-quality digital research infrastructure.
Genomics Facility Manager - Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF), Sydney NSW AUA
The Genomics Facility Manager will play a critical role in establishing a new Genomics Facility located at the Kolling Institute and the delivery of high-quality services. The role requires a combination specialist genomics knowledge and advanced laboratory and organizational skills. Reporting to the National Laboratory Operations Manager, the role will initially liaise with AGRF and Kolling building management to coordinate the establishment of the laboratory, and key high-throughput workflows for clinical and translational genomics. Ongoing, the role will provide leadership within the laboratory, collaborating with the team to deliver exceptional genomics services at the Kolling site.
National Next Generation Sequencing Manager - Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF), Melbourne VIC AU
Reporting to the National Laboratory Operations Manager, the National Next Generation Sequencing Manager is responsible for monitoring, developing, and improving all services delivered on our Illumina platform and supporting our other systems when needed. With expert knowledge of Next Generation Sequencing, extensive laboratory and team management experience, this role ensures consistent service delivery across all platforms by supporting a high performing, client-driven team culture.
Director of Bioinformatics, Prenatal - BillionToOne, Menlo Park or Union City CA USA
As the Director of Bioinformatics, Prenatal at BillionToOne, you will lead a dynamic team of Bioinformatics Scientists and Engineers, shaping the direction of our prenatal bioinformatics efforts. You will be responsible for developing, implementing, and supporting clinical next-generation sequencing analysis pipelines for the Unity product line. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams (R&D, clinical, Software Engineering, Process Engineering, Product) to support new assay development and existing assay enhancements, with a strong emphasis on scaling and workflow efficiency. This is a full-time hybrid role (at least ~40% on-site in Menlo Park or Union City locations) and reports to the VP of Lab Operations.
Bioinformatics Manager (Spatial) - Complete Genomics, San Jose CA USA
As the Spatial Bioinformatics Manager at Complete Genomics, you will lead groundbreaking research and development initiatives in life sciences, biotechnology, and healthcare applications. Leveraging your technical expertise and hands-on experience in data analysis, particularly in single-cell sequencing and spatial genomics, you will drive the evolution of data analysis pipelines and spearhead new product development efforts.
Project Manager with background in Bioinformatics - Cognizant, East Hanover NJ USA
Lead the planning and implementation of project tasks in the field of bioinformatics and research & development. Coordinate cross-functional teams to ensure project achievements are met efficiently. Apply bioinformatics knowledge to solve complex problems in project development.
Scientific HPC Infrastructure Manager - General Dynamics IT, Remote USA
Own your opportunity to work alongside federal civilian agencies. Make an impact by providing services that help the government ensure the well being of U.S. citizens. Our Scientific Infrastructure Team is responsible for enabling and managing High Performance Computing and its associated infrastructure and interconnects across multiple locations, 100’s of COTS and open-source scientific applications, and ~40PB of data storage to include data archive, lifecycle policy management and data sharing services. This team serves as a customer-facing presence for the NIAID research community, providing a single point of support for new initiatives, ongoing projects, and scientific infrastructure needs. In your role as a Scientific/HPC Infrastructure Team Manager, you will lead a multidisciplinary team responsible for delivering comprehensive scientific infrastructure services to an end-user community of approximately 4500.
Head of HPC Performance - Algo Capital Group, New York NY USA
As the principal engineer, you will play a pivotal role in optimizing their HPC and AI compute workloads to increase trading capabilities. You will collaborate with senior stakeholders in the business including the quantitative researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to create innovative solutions that drive their competitive edge in the capital markets.
Head of Statistics and Data Science team - UK Department of Health and Social Care, London or Leeds UK
This is an important senior role in our analytical community: you will be our Head of Profession for statistics, leading our statistics and data science staff across the Department and working closely with our Chief Statistician, Lucy Vickers. With your team of 30 staff, you will develop capability, oversee and improve our statistics portfolio, lead data science projects and provide ministers and colleagues with statistical advice and data analysis.
Principal Applied Scientist Manager - Microsoft Weather - Microsoft, Redmond WA USA
We are currently seeking a Principal Applied Scientist Manager with a robust background in Machine Learning and Weather Science to lead the Microsoft Weather AI Forecast Science Team. Our team is globally recognized as the most accurate weather forecast provider (press release , official evaluation), serving over 1 billion users. If you’re passionate about artificial intelligence and product development at web scale, this role might be a perfect fit for you. You will drive innovation in weather forecast modeling. This involves research and development in forecast models, including deep learning, transformers, GANs, diffusion, CNNs, foundational models, and ensemble forecasts. You will leverage our strengths in user data and weather data to advance enhance our forecasting capabilities. You will drive an exceptional vision and strategy to disrupt weather forecast, and build strong collaborations with academia. We are looking for an experienced leader who can make a direct impact to 1B+ users globally, algorithmic improvements to online and offline systems, develop and deliver robust and scalable solutions, and continually improve our KPIs.
Partner Research Scientist, AI For Good - Microsoft, Redmond WA USA
The Microsoft AI for Good Research Lab leverages the power of data, our cloud technology, data science talent, and the Microsoft brand to catalyze and inspire others to partner in solving the world’s greatest challenges. Over the past five years, AI for Good Lab has become a data and AI driven solution creator, and trusted advisors working closely with leaders across Microsoft, academia, NGOs, UN agencies and all levels of government. Our mission is to use AI and technology to help organizations address the world’s greatest challenges. Microsoft is seeking a highly skilled and passionate Partner Research Scientist to join our AI For Good team. As a key member of this dynamic group, you will drive groundbreaking research in artificial intelligence and its application to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges in areas such as health, accessibility, environmental sustainability, and humanitarian action. This position requires a unique blend of deep technical expertise, a passion for making the world a better place, and the ability to work collaboratively both within Microsoft and with external global organizations.
Engineering Lead at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS) - University of Cambridge, Cambridge UK
We are keen to recruit an Engineering Lead with a specialism in a relevant area such as: AI/Machine Learning Climate Science/Numerical Modelling High-Performance Computing experience It is not a requirement to have experience in all of the areas. The Engineering Lead will collaborate with the Head of Research Software Engineering and the Computer Science lead. The post also includes funding to support travel to conferences and for training activities to support career development as well as an affiliation with Queens' college.
Head of Data Science and Bioinformatics - Resiliance, San Diego CA USA
Resilience is seeking an outstanding Head of Data Science and Bioinformatics to lead our personalized medicine platform development in our advanced R&D division. This position will lead a team of bioinformaticians and data scientists developing and leveraging multi-omics assays based on next-generation sequencing (NGS), computer vision, and other advanced analytical approaches. This role requires establishing high-level strategies aligned with the overall vision for the platform establishment and rollout.
Senior Director, Health Informatics, Oncology AI Adoption - Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York NY USA
If you possess a deep enthusiasm for AI to support clinical care, clinical research, and operations, this is the perfect role for you. You will be part of a dynamic Health Informatics team in DigITs, MSK's enterprise digital organization, and take on a leadership role that impacts the future of AI in cancer care. As the Senior Director, Health Informatics, Oncology AI Adoption, you'll collaborate with MSK patients, clinicians, operations, and clinical researchers to develop the digital strategy for the Responsible Use of AI in Oncology. You will accelerate and drive the wise deployment, adoption, and impact of Responsible Oncology AI in real-world practice.
Project Manager for Scientific Software - Genedata, Boston MA USA
As the next potential Project Manager for the Genedata Profiler platform, you will be a key member of our dynamic team, empowered to have a significant impact on the continuous growth of our business. You will work with our partners in translational research achieving their vision of precision medicine through leveraging the full power of clinical, molecular, and imaging data. This includes planning, executing, and controlling customer projects such as software deployment, configuration, integration, platform adoption, training, and scientific data consulting, etc.