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Research Software Engineering Case Studies

These case studies offer insight into how RSEs work with researchers to overcome challenges and accelerate discovery.

If you are a researcher and would like to discuss how your local RSE group could support and accelerate your work please visit our research software engineering homepage.


Julie Wilson

Digital Health - University of York

Dr Julie Wilson is a professor in applied statistics in the Department of Mathematics at the University of York. She develops methods for data pre-processing and analysis and has experience in statistical pattern recognition, classification and machine learning techniques.

RSEs were able to help her research by rewriting code (originally in C) in R, which significantly reduced computation time.

  Cell Morphology.pdf

Helena Tendedez

Digital Health - Lancaster University

Respire is a data dashboard that brings together data about patients who have about Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder from two collaborating NHS trusts. The information is presented to clinicians in a way that ensures that care decisions are based on reliable data, saving time and improving patient care.

In this project RSEs helped to develop visual prototypes of the app to help increase user engagement with the project.

  Respire Dashboard for COPD

Peter-John Mäntylä Noble

Digital Health - University of Liverpool

SAVSNET collects clinical notes and questionnaire data from UK veterinary practices alongside results from the UK’s larger veterinary laboratories.

This data is analysed to help monitor disease trends, identify at risk animal populations, provide data to academics, improve public awareness of small animal diseases and provide a route to clinical benchmarking.

In this project RSEs help to manage the software and server architecture required for data collection and added a data dashboard to make it easier to analyse the results.

  Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET)

Mark Turner and Stephen Downsland

Digital Humanities - Newcastle University

Caring for pre-historic rock art can be incredibly challenging as the rocks are often in remote places.

In this project RSEs developed a mobile app that enabled the general public and and specialists to provide photographs and condition reports about the rocks. These reports could then be used by those responsible for caring for the rocks to ensure their conservation and preservation.

  Condition and Risk Assessment Portal (CARE)

Susan Fitzmaurice and Seth Mell

Digital Humanities - University of Sheffield

Professor Susan Fitzmaurice and Dr. Seth Mell's project is called 'The Linguistic DNA'. It has analysed more than 1 billion words from 60,000 printed English documents from the 16th and 17th centuries in the search for patterns of words and meaning.

In this project the RSEs developed a bespoke computational linguistics tool to perform computational tasks; something that was impossible to achieve with existing software.

  The Linguistic DNA (LDNA)

Ed Ruck-Keene

Durham University

Since the summer of 2017 Advanced Research Computing at Durham University have been working to create a central research software engineering team to support researchers across the institution.

In this case study Ed Ruck-Keene talks about the process of undertaking this work and introduces the RSEs who are already part of the team.

  Growth of an RSE Team in Durham

Mark Richardson

University of Leeds

In this case study Mark Richardson talks about his work at CEMAC, the Centre for Environmental Modelling and Computation.

Mark and his team of software scientists work with academics to improve and add capabilities to research groups across the University of Leeds.

  CEMAC - Centre for Environmental Modelling and Computation

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