Mentoring supports professional and personal development, helping people to identify and pursue goals, respond to challenging situations, and get broader perspectives. This may be through 1:1 interaction or in small groups of peers, and may use traditional informative mentoring, coaching, or peer-support techniques. An RSE mentoring scheme would help RSEs who do not have access to mentoring within their institution, want external contacts or who are looking for advice related to RSE activities. It could be particularly valuable at times of transition such as transferring from academic track to an RSE role or moving into leadership. This panel will engage the community in the creation of a scheme by raising awareness, promoting discussion and gathering input and feedback. Open questions to answer include whether mentoring should be in groups or 1:1, which communities mentors should be drawn from and how they could be trained, how best to serve under-represented groups, how participants should be matched and what infrastructure support is needed. The panel will include people with experience as mentors, as mentees and in setting up and running schemes to give various perspectives on mentoring and how to implement it.
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Panelists (in alphabetical order):
Dr Toni Collis is the Director and CEO of Collis-Holmes Innovations and Chair of Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC). Toni is a strategic manager, and a Leadership & Success Coach. As an HPC professional the focus of her work has been on enabling those without detailed training in computer science and HPC to still use supercomputers and developing a pipeline of inclusive technology leaders. Toni has worked on a variety of mentoring programmes including redesigning the mentoring programme for the International HPC Summer School and helping to put in place a new mentoring programme for WHPC over the last 12 months that supports women internationally in their earliest career stages to mentoring for women in senior management. Toni specialises in strategy for HPC & workforce inclusion in Tech and providing Leadership Coaching for women in STEM.
- Catherine Jones, STFC, UK
Catherine Jones leads the Software Engineering Group in the Scientific Computing Department at STFC. She has a computing degree, is a member of the British Computer Society and a chartered Librarian. Her Group provides Anvil, for research software testing ; experimental research data management systems and STFC publication and data repositories. Her personal research interests are the digital curation of software & data; linking research outputs (data, publications and software) and career paths for Research Software Engineers. She is a member of the SSI Advisory Board, the Research Software Alliance organising committee and the organising committee for the SuperComputing19 Early Careers Programme. She has managed staff for over twenty-five years and both been mentored and has mentored other staff during her career at STFC. She has also recently been professionally coached on enhancing her female leadership style in a male environment.
- James Hetherington, Turing Institute, UK
James is the Director of Research Engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. James directs the "Tools, Practices and Systems" research programme within UK Research and Innovation's strategic priority programme "AI for Science, Engineering, Health and Government".
James leads a team of research software engineers and data scientists contributing to a huge range of data- and compute-intensive research. They build and use tools to analyse and present large datasets, and create complex models running on state of the art supercomputers.
He was the founding head of UCL’s Research Software Engineering Group, the first such group in the UK. Fields addressed included ancient Mesopotamian history, graph theoretical approaches to modeling chemical catalysis, intensive care big data, compressive sensing for the Square Kilometer Array, the history of trans-oceanic journalistic exchanges, data centric engineering, brain blood flow simulations and DNA crime scene analysis statistics.
- Mateusz Kuzak, DTL, Netherlands
Mateusz Kuzak is a Research Software Community Manager at the Netherlands eScience Center, where he works on communities and training around research software, it’s sustainability and reusability. Before that Mateusz worked at the Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences fostering science community around data stewardship. Before that, Mateusz was building research software at the Netherlands eScience Center in collaborative projects with domain scientists. At the Center Mateusz also helped to develop the training program around essential computing skills offered to project partners. Before becoming Research Software Engineer, he worked in the field of Biophysics spending lots of time with microscopes. Mateusz have been also involved in the Carpentries community as an instructor, trainer, mentor and Steering Committee member.
Aiman Shaikh is driven towards making innovative discoveries in the field of technology. Currently working as a Research Software Engineer at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) Hartree Centre, Aiman is motivated by applying her expertise to enterprise by facilitating technological advancements and unlocking value for industry through high performance computing. Enjoying both research and practical elements of her role, Aiman is driven to make a positive impact within the field by applying technology to solve industry challenges and advocating for female participation in both underdeveloped and developing countries. By presenting her work and being an active member of the HPC community, Aiman feels that her presence can encourage other female developers and software researchers to take up careers within the field.
