JuRSE

November 2025

Welcome everyone to the JuRSE newsletter for November!

JuRSE (Jülich Research Software Engineering) is a grassroots community for all FZJ scientists and students who code and/or anyone interested in research software.

The purpose of this newsletter is to update you about JuRSE community initiatives at FZJ and some of the national and international activities in Research Software Engineering (RSE) and inspire you to get involved in the community. Please feel free to forward this to any colleagues who may be interested in this topic and in joining the JuRSE Community.

Two quick ways you can get involved:

Join the RSE Rocketchat channel open to all FZJ staff
Join the national RSE Community on matrix hosted by the de-RSE Association.

JuRSE

JuRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

JuRSE Survey

We want to hear from you! Are you coding in your research role at Forschungszentrum Jülich? The Jülich Research Software Engineering (JuRSE) team is reaching out to you to better understand your work, challenges, and needs. Your insights will directly shape the resources, services, and events we provide for our coding community at FZJ.

Open Hours

We host Open Hours every Wednesday both in-person in the gegenüber lounge in the ZB and online. All are welcome to come and talk to us about anything. This is an opportunity to learn from each other and expand our collective knowledge.

Code of the Month

The JuRSE Team wants to shine a spotlight on the diverse and excellent research software that is being developed at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The code pick of November 2025 is Elephant (Electrophysiology Analysis Toolkit), an open-source, community centered library for the analysis of electrophysiological brain activity data in the Python programming language. The focus of Elephant is on generic analysis functions for spike train data and time series recordings from electrodes, such as the local field potentials or intracellular voltages. Find out more on the JuRSE website.

Travel Grants Available

JuRSE has launched a travel grant program for the deRSE26 conference, open for everyone including FZJ employees. We are taking applications until November 7. More info here.

JuRSE Training

We have a number of training courses coming up before the end of the year:

Software architectures for research software Join us on the 13^th November from 10:00am – 12:00 online. More information and registration.
Testing for Research Software – Date TBD. More information and registration information can be found on the JuRSE website soon.

Blog Posts

“FZJ at UK RSECon’25”

HiRSE

HiRSE is now on Linkedin! Connect with us

HiRSE Seminar Series

Join us at our next HiRSE Seminar, “AI Coding Assistants in Research Software: Legal Aspects” on 18^th November at 11am where we will hear from Giuditta Parolini, a data scientist working for the research data management services at the Museum für Naturkunde-Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science in Berlin.

Helmholtz Research Software Directory

The Research Software Directory is where you can promote and discover research software from Helmholtz centres. After recent updates to the directory, you can now nominate yourself for a spotlight on their website to showcase your research software and they've introduced some more functionality to make integration easier. Check out the details here.

National Initiatives

FutuRSI, a joint initiative supported by six partner institutions to conceptualise a German research software institution, is releasing a series of blog posts and the first three are available now:

FutuRSI was one of the few representatives from Germany at the OECD ‘Access to research software: Opportunities and challenges’ workshop in Paris. Read the reflections: ‘Access to Research Software: Reflections from OECD-Workshop in Paris’.

Most recently, FutuRSI released this report ‘Key issues for the design of a German Research software institution’. Take a read here, available in both German and English.

Join the organizing committee - for the submission of a proposal for a workshop at the ISC High Performance conference in June 2026. The using focus will be AI for RSE work in the HPC world, specifically for development of (highly) parallel software. Contact René Caspart (rene.caspart@kit.edu) or Robert Speck (r.speck@fz-juelich.de).

HiDA Mobility Program: The HIDA Mobility Program enables short-term research stays (1- 3 months) for all Helmholtz doctoral researchers and postdocs (employed at or affiliated with a Helmholtz Center), whose work is linked to (applied) data and information sciences. Applications are now being accepted on an ongoing basis.

Events

Software Management Plans supporting FAIR and Open-Source Software in NFDI - Nov 18, 2025 02:00 PM CEST, Online – A virtual workshop where Dr. Leyla Jael Castro will introduce Software Management Plans and will explore how they support FAIR for research software and contribute to the adoption of good practices for open-source software development. Registration is open.

Research Software Engineers in HPC - Sunday, November 16, 2025, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm CST (UTC-6), St. Louis, MO & Online - This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC, from all over the world, to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders. More info.

GAMM RSE & RDM Kick-Off meeting – December 4-5, 2025: The GAMM Activity Group on Research Software Engineering and Research Data Management in Mathematics & Mechanics will formally start on Dec 4-5, 2025, at Technical University of Braunschweig with a lunch-to-lunch kickoff meeting. If you are interested in math, mechanics, RSE, RDM, and/or some wild mixture of this, the activity group and this kickoff meeting is a great place to exchange thoughts! Join us for this kickoff meeting here, with or without a talk: And no worries, you won't be alone there. We have two great keynote speakers at the interface of RSE & RDM and CSE: Philipp Birken (University of Lund) and Jörg Unger (Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung). If you are interested in the activity group but cannot attend the kickoff, you can join our mailing list to stay in touch.

ErUM-Data Community: DIG-UM Annual Meeting 2025 – December 4: Discuss the progress of digital transformation in the ErUM community with contributions from the BMFTR, all DIG-UM topic groups, the DIG-UM boards, and the ErUM-Data-Hub. In addition, the DIG-UM Award will be presented to three outstanding scientists from the ERUM community during the meeting. The in-person part of the meeting will take place in Aachen. Spaces are limited. There is no participation fee.

Recommended Reading & Tools

RSE Podcast Episodes

Listen to our own FZJers, Robert Speck and Jayesh Badwaik in this podcast episode from 'Code for Thought'. - 'This year's RSE workshop at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany, focused on one theme: continuous benchmarking for high performance computing. Organisers Rene Caspart (KIT) and Robert Speck (FZJ) tell us how it all went, while keynote speakers Michele Mesiti (KIT) and Jayesh Badwaik (FZJ) give us concrete examples of how they go about continuous benchmarking - and why.'