Research Software & Systems Engineers – AFRICAMany roles exist in academia beyond the traditional ‘academics’ and ‘support staff’. Research Software Engineers, for example, are people who combine professional software expertise with an understanding of research. Research Systems Engineers are people who develop and maintain computing systems to support research. Over the past years there has been some effort to establish an African Research Software and Systems Engineers community where resources and information can be shared and lobbying can be done for the careers of people employed in academic environments, but who shouldn’t be measured by the number of papers they publish or the number of students they graduate. For more information about international efforts see https://researchsoftware.org/ and https://www.software.ac.uk/research-software-engineers. This project supports the development of an African community of practice of RSSEs.
Volunteer driven with no funding currently
Founder: Peter van Heusden (South African National Bioinformatics Institute, South Africa)
Co-founder: Eugene de Beste (Centre for High Performance Computing ACE Lab, South Africa)