Advances in High Performance Computing (HPC) and scientific software development will have increasingly significant societal impact through the computational design of new products, medicines, materials and industrial processes. However, the complexity of modern HPC hardware means that scientific software development now requires teams of scientists and programmers to work together, with different and non-overlapping skill-sets required from each member of the group. This complexity can lead to software development projects stalling. Investments in software development are in danger of being lost, either because key members of a team move on, or because a lack of planning or engagement means that a sustainable user and developer community has failed to gel around a particular code. Research Software Engineers (RSEs) can solve this problem. RSEs have the skills and training necessary to support software development projects as they move through different stages of the academic software lifecycle. Academic software evolves along this lifecycle, from being a code used by an initial team of researchers, through to a large multi-site community code used by academics and industrialists from across the UK and around the World. RSEs provide the training and support needed to help academic software developers structure their projects to support the sustainable growth of their user and developer communities. RSEs are also highly skilled programmers who can train software developers in advanced HPC techniques, and who can support developers in the implementation, optimisation and testing of complex and intricate code. Together with academic software developers, RSEs can support UK investment in HPC, and ensure that the potential of computational science and engineering to revolutionise the design of future products and industrial processes is realised. This project aims to develop sustainable RSE career pathways and funding at Bristol. This will support the growth of a sustainable team of RSEs at the University. Software development projects that will be supported include; the building of code to interface real biological cells with virtual simulated cells, so to support the rapid design of new biomanufacturing control processes; the development of code to more quickly model the behaviour of electrons in novel materials, to support the design of new fuel cells and batteries; code to improve our understanding of glass-like matter, so to help design new materials with exciting new properties; software to support modelling of the quantum interaction between laser light and microscopic nanoparticles, to support the design of optical tweezers and new optically driven nanomachines; and code to design new medicinal drugs and to understand why existing treatments are no longer working, thereby supporting the development of 21st century medicine. Finally, this project aims to create a coherent set of teaching materials in programming and research software engineering. These, together with the development of software to support science and programming lessons held in an interactive 3D planetarium, will help inspire and educate the next generation of scientists and RSEs. These materials will showcase how maths, physics, computing and chemistry can be used in the "real world" to create the high-tech tools and industries of the future.

Computational research is increasingly important in the fields of science, engineering and medicine. Advances in simulation, modelling and data analysis techniques, combined with ever more powerful computing hardware resources, offer a variety of new opportunities to scientists and researchers. However, building and using complex computational science codes continues to be a challenging process. Many computational developers will probably say that developing code to make effective use of modern infrastructure and supporting their end-users who want to run this code on such infrastructure are some of the key difficulties that they face. Building and maintaining a strong base of evolving technical skills and knowledge can help to address such challenges but the sheer volume of different technologies, libraries, tools and applications that developers have to contend with means that being part of a strong and sustainable community of peers can offer valuable support. This fellowship will undertake a programme of software development, community building and support for computational research to enable and drive the development of a strong community of RSEs at Imperial College London and contribute outputs back into the wider UK RSE community. Working alongside recently established Research Computing Services and emerging RSE support activities and provision currently being developed at Imperial, the fellowship will lead to strong impacts in the way that scientists and researchers make use of software engineering in their research. The work programme will take a "hub and spoke" approach to managing and developing RSE capabilities. A set of core activities, representing the spokes, will feed into a core RSE "hub" that will build a base of RSE knowledge, skills and experience within Imperial College, and feed outputs back to the UK RSE community and RSE Network. This will assist in growing this valuable community resource, attracting new members and gaining a stronger understanding of the real-world benefits that it provides. The software engineering aspect of the fellowship will be undertaken in collaboration with scientists and researchers in two domains - simulation methods and biomedical research. This programme of software development will build on previous collaborations, applying RSE expertise to address the aforementioned challenges of providing easier access to complex computational codes and processes for end-users, and simplifying deployment of analysis processes to a range of computing infrastructure. The community building aspect of the fellowship will support a range of activities expanding the base of RSE expertise and the community structure at Imperial. Collaboration with regional RSE groups will support the building of a regional community of RSEs with an annual, London-based workshop at its core. The model for setting up and running such a community will be refined and contributed back into the UK RSE community with a view to supporting the development of such regional groups in other geographic areas. Evaluation of the sustainability of software outputs and aspects of the event and seminar programme will be undertaken in collaboration with the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI). A further element of the fellowship will be the undertaking of an economic analysis exercise with the aim of gaining an understanding of the costs and benefits of RSE approaches to software development when compared to approaches traditionally followed by research groups. This has the potential for major impact through a much greater understanding of when, where and how RSE is most practical and effective. It is believed that this fellowship stands to offer transformative, wide-reaching impacts in extending the opportunities available to RSEs and helping to further grow the UK RSE community, in addition to supporting the development of strong, sustainable and successful RSE activities within Imperial College London.

Today, images are everywhere and are increasingly used in science. There are many examples of the importance of images over the history of science, a classic example being the motion sequence photographs of Eadweard Muybridge taken in 1878. These showed for the first time that for a brief moment when a horse gallops none of its feet are on the ground, thus capturing the truth through photography and paving the way for the development of the motion-picture industry ten years later. Imaging science is the multidisciplinary pursuit concerned with generating, collecting, analysing, enhancing, and visualizing images. Despite the UK being strong in imaging and having many strategic centres of excellence supporting a variety of imaging methods it currently lacks integration with research computing, which is essential for processing and understanding the detail of these images. These facilities are traditionally based around one imaging method but this fellowship copies the SCI (Scientific Computing and Imaging) Institute in Utah which is an international centre of excellence where software is developed across the range of imaging methods and for the variety of disciplines that use images. This approach allows knowledge to be transferred and software re-purposed across a variety of imaging communities. In the long term, by major goal is to develop a centre of excellence at UoL similar to the SCI Institute. There are two strands to the fellowship; the first is to develop software while the second is to upgrade computational skills and develop a computational community for imaging. In this fellowship I will work with two of these national imaging facilities to develop software for a number of strategic case studies. Seven of these will based around new spectral imaging methods along with an initial training case in super-resolution light imaging. The new spectral imaging methods are novel because they include spectroscopy information for each pixel or voxel of the 2D or 3D image. The fundamental physical principles for extracting the exact structural chemical information in spectroscopic X-ray and electron micrograph (em) images are now well established, but there are no software packages that implement the whole of this computational workflow. This fellowship will develop easy-to-use software for 2D, 3D and 4D visualization of X-ray and em images, integrating software tools, re-purposing algorithms and designing new visualization techniques. This fellowship will also upgrade computing skills in imaging at UoL. I will do this by working with a stakeholder group which includes four senior researchers. The PDRA and I will develop software for them, and those they collaborate with, and I will mentor one of their researchers who support others in their research groups. Knowledge from this mentoring will inform me about what training materials need to be developed on campus. I will also lead three computational networks at the UoL which will be advertised across the N8 (Northern 8 Universities). There will be one meeting a month across these networks which includes an annual one day conference for each of the networks. While working on these two objectives I will continue to develop professionally and further develop my research into the role of the RSE. With help from the SSI I will disseminate this research and campaign for the RSE role both at UoL and nationwide.

The national collection is distributed throughout communities, localities, and national organisations. In the past two decades communities have adopted digital technologies to gather and record their collections in a form of 'citizen history' that has created a truly democratic and vast reservoir of new knowledge about the past. This reservoir could immeasurably enrich our national and global understanding but remains largely untapped, hard to find, and at risk of disappearing altogether. The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK's prime cultural assets, but it is 'critically endangered' due to technological and organisational barriers. CGDC has proved extraordinarily resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration, meaning that resources often funded and produced by the public stand alone or are inaccessible. Diverse community-focused voices, sustaining the fragile histories of communities in transition, have effectively been silenced within our shared national collection. Existing solutions to this problem involving bespoke interventionist activities are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, whilst any unsophisticated computational integration of this data would result in a lowest-common-denominator solution which would erase the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. The Our Heritage, Our Stories project responds to this urgent challenge by bringing together a powerful partnership, including researchers in digital humanities, archives, history, linguistics, and computer science at our HEI partners, the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA), the project's lead IRO. This team will bring cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC and the collections of TNA. We will collaborate in this process with leading UK heritage organisations, including Tate, the British Museum, the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and a network of smaller regional and local heritage organisations holding digital content created by and relating to communities. Our geographic range is essential for a truly national approach which engages with every part of the UK. Our project will use multidisciplinary methods to make previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC discoverable within the national collection, while respecting and embracing its complexity and diversity by co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make it searchable and connected. We will showcase its new accessibility to the world through a major new public-facing Observatory at TNA where people can access, reuse, and remix this newly integrated content. As we dissolve barriers and add meaningful links across these collections, we will make them accessible to new and diverse audiences and open them up for research - demonstrated via multidisciplinary case studies - and embed new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training. Public engagement is a driving theme in our project, which will be developed on principles of co-production and participatory design. The lasting legacies of this project will be the wealth of previously siloed, hidden, and fragmented CGDC it will situate and render discoverable. By so doing, we will revolutionise our understanding of the past, and the methods and means to achieve this, by developing cutting-edge tools, AI methods, historical and linguistic research, and new frameworks for sustainable archival practice. By enabling CGDC to be re-used and reimagined, we will help it survive and be nourished, for the future and for our shared national collection.

Open science is perhaps best embodied by the FAIR principles for software and data: that they should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. When researchers make their code and data available for others to use, it becomes easier for others to verify results, as well as easier for others to build on and use to spur new research of their own. Alongside the FAIR principles is the idea of "sustainable" software, which is software that can continue to be used after its original intended purpose, remaining reliable and reproducible. Sustainable software is important for high quality research. The goal of this Fellowship is to help researchers in plasma science overcome barriers to implementing these principles and ideas in their work, and bring about a cultural change to make sharing FAIR software and data the norm. I will do this by establishing a national network of research software engineers (RSEs) who will undertake efficient, wide-ranging improvements across the plasma science software ecosystem. The objective is not to make a single code massively better; it is to create and maintain an environment and philosophy that will benefit all plasma codes used in the UK -- "a rising tide lifts all boats". In order to reach as much of the community as possible, this national network will focus on short usability and sustainability projects, along with training tailored to individual researchers and groups. This will be paired with code review, where an RSE will go through a piece of software with researchers and discuss its aims and implementation. Code review is commonplace in industry, but rarer in academia. Together, the use of code review and short projects will give the network a good idea of what software is needed and used by the community, targeting projects where they are most needed and encouraging reuse of software between groups. As well as improving software directly, I will also work on the data front. To do this, I will develop tools to help overcome the friction and effort needed for researchers to adopt FAIR data practices. These tools will add metadata output to software, capturing important information like what version of what code created the output. This metadata can then be used to automate uploading the output to a database. I will work with the plasma science and data communities to develop what this metadata will look like, while the national network will implement these tools across the plasma science software ecosystem.