The STEP-UP platform is an EPSRC project to develop and support digital Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) and their ecosystem.
'Digital infrastructure' – enabling computational modelling, processing of larger datasets, creation of advanced research facilities, sharing results openly – is the foundation of an increasing number of research domains, including the arts, humanities and cultural studies and research.
STEP-UP starting point is that a trained, motivated 'people infrastructure' of expert technical talent – such as research software engineers, research data stewards and compute infrastructure managers – along with the career opportunities to support them, is critical to meet new and increasing demands on institutional and national research digital infrastructures.
Led by Imperial College London in collaboration with University College London, University of Westminster and indeed King’s College London (via both e-Research and King’s Digital Lab), STEP-UP project team builds on the Research Software London (RSLondon) community to support and train digital RTPs across software development, data management and processing, and computational infrastructure domains.
Valuing staff which are in high demand, e.g. in tech startups and other industry roles, is critical to STEP-UP together with well-defined career path, and mechanisms for recognition within research project teams and institutions. Existing role structures within research organisations frequently create unhelpful barriers between researchers and technical staff. These structures also sustain an outdated view of academic versus technical accomplishment.
King’s Digital Lab, via the co-lead role of its Director and expert contribution from other members of the team is addressing these challenges in research technical careers and recognition head-on. The platform provides short-term funding to develop a robust model for sharing technical talent within and across institutions, and for increasing awareness of its importance with researchers and institutional governance also in the disciplines KDL works the most in, starting from good practices at PhD level (via the STEP-UP Champions scheme) to peer support (mentorship scheme), training programmes and advanced research workflows.
KDL has committed to define the roles of people and their career pathways in research digital infrastructures since its inception, sharing reflections and establishing frameworks around the Lab’s structure, contributing to community engagement (including the recent national RSE capability in the arts and humanities roadmap led by the Data/Culture project) and attracting other funding such as DARIAH-DESIR and more recently DiscouRSE.
Team
- Arianna Ciula KDL Co-Investigator, KDL
- James Graham Co-Investigator, KCL eResearch
- James Wilson Co-Investigator, University College London
- Jay Deslauriers Researcher
- Jeremy Cohen Principal investigator, Imperial College London
- Joshua Lambert Researcher
- Mary Chester-Kadwell KDL Research Software Engineer
- Michael Bearpark Co-Investigator, Imperial College London
- Miguel Vieira KDL Research Software Engineer
- Pamela Mellen Research Software Lab Manager
- Prateek Gupta Researcher
- Samantha Ahern Researcher
- Shane Warren Researcher
- Tamas Kiss Co-Investigator, University of Westminister
- Zihao Lu KDL Research Software Designer
Project links
Partner institution
Keywords
- Machine Learning and AI
- Digital Futures Institute