King's College London

The new £2m programme – Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals (STEP-UP) – aims to plug gaps in recruitment and nurture the training, careers, and recognition available to digital research technical professionals (RTPs).

STEP-UP will set up cross-institution secondment opportunities, make technical training available for digital RTPs across different skill levels, and develop and run a mentoring scheme. This will work to create a people infrastructure of expert technical talent – along with career opportunities to support them.

STEP-UP is co-led by King's Digital Lab Director and Senior Research Software Analyst, Dr Arianna Ciula and James Graham, with Jeremy Cohen (Imperial College London), UCL and the University of Westminster. It is one of the 11 community-driven projects funded by the £16 million investment by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) to support research technical professionals.

Research technical professionals are vital to the effective operation of research infrastructure across the UK. They use their skills and experience to support academic and industrial research, as well as train users in the latest techniques and methods.

Project Partners and Contributions:

EPCC, University of Edinburgh (UoE) will contribute access to HPC resources and related materials to support training while the University of Oxford will provide support with developing training materials. ReSA will help to share outputs with an international audience. The Software Sustainability Institute will support activities including training and dissemination of project outputs. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine will be a mentoring partner, offering a group of mentees and helping to review our mentoring scheme. The Society of RSE will help to publicise outputs and a trustee will contribute to the Operations Board.