Research software engineering: a movement and its instantiation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

In 2012, a small group looking at challenges related to the development and maintenance of research software realized that there was no community identity (e.g., common title, career path, professional association) for the people involved, so they started a process to define and create these. Today, 13+ years later, there are research software engineer (RSE) and engineering (RSEng) groups at more than 100 universities, and RSE societies and associations in more than 10 countries (e.g., UK, US, Germany, Belgium), with over 10000 members and annual physical and virtual conferences, including a first global research software conference coming in 2026. This talk will briefly discuss the movement that created this, then will focus on the experience of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where there is now a group of 45 RSEs in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and many more across the university. RSEs at NCSA bring skills and expertise including full-stack development, UI/UX design, GIS, AI, MLOps, DevOps, and data science and engineering with projects such as Clowder, IN-CORE, Illinois Chat, DeCODER, etc., across multiple scholarly and industrial domains. Beyond technical advancement, the group has been developing and enhancing mentoring RSEs and RSE managers. The talk will discuss how this group was developed, the challenges it overcame, and the challenges that remain.