Meeting of South West RSE’s at the University of Exeter

When: Friday 20 February 2026, 10am – 3pm (refreshments from 9:30am for a 10am start)
Where: Peter Chalk Centre, Newman Red Lecture Theatre, Exeter, EX4 4QQ (How to get here)

Meeting Blog

Read our meeting blog for a full write-up of the day, including summaries of all the talks and the panel discussion.

Organisers

• Jeremy Pike (Lead)
• Tom Hawes
• Ruxandra Neatu
• Paul Wright

Purpose

Following a successful event at the University of Bristol in June 2025, the University of Exeter hosted a third meeting on Friday 20 February 2026.

Code of conduct

All participants are expected to adhere to the Society of RSE code of conduct for events.

Agenda

09:30	Registration & refreshments
10:00	Welcome Ruxandra Neatu
10:05	Delivering high-quality research software that lasts: Is there a need for learning resources to enable iterative, customer‑focused development practices? Emma Hogan (Met Office) keynote 20 min
10:25	Building for the Future with The Bristol Centre for Supercomputing Anna Price & Tom Green (University of Bristol) keynote 20 min
10:45	Networking break and group photo20 min Refreshments and informal discussion
11:05	Session 1: Community and Recognition in RSE 55 min JOSS×RSECon26: A brief introduction to Research Software Papers at RSECon26 remote Warrick Ball (University of Birmingham) 10 min Introduction to the Bath Research Software Engineering Group Stephen Cook (University of Bath) 5 min Scaling Climate Services at the Met Office: An Introduction to the Work and the Team Alex Stanhope & Daniel Cubbon (Met Office) 10 min The NERC Earth Observation Data Analysis and AI Service (NEODAAS) and other projects the RSE team at Plymouth Marine Laboratory work on Dan Clewley (Plymouth Marine Laboratory) 10 min X-CITED: Building RSE Careers Through Community & Development Nicole Whippey (University of Exeter) 5 min RSE Adventures in Server Management Michael Pei (University of Bristol) 5 min Discussion & Q&A 10 min
12:00	Lunch60 min Lunch and optional walk
13:00	Session 2: Methods, Practices, and Tools in Research Software 30 min Tool showcase: Automatically testing web interfaces James Frost (Met Office) 5 min Developing a Telegram bot to deliver seasonal climate forecasts Kieren Pitts (University of Bristol) 5 min Accelerating Astrophysical Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics with GPUs Tom Bending (University of Exeter) 5 min Is an MCP server a viable alternative to a command-line client? Fred Wobus (University of Exeter) 5 min Discussion & Q&A 10 min
13:30	Session 3: Beyond Academia 30 min RAPIDS/CUDA-X Data Science and how GPU Acceleration fits in the PyData ecosystem Jacob Tomlinson (NVIDIA) 10 min Working as a bioinformatician in the Life Sciences industry Jack Feltham (Syngenta) 10 min Discussion & Q&A 10 min
14:00	Networking break20 min Refreshments and informal discussion
14:20	Panel Discussion: Quality and Reproducibility in Academia and Industry35 min Chair: Kolen Cheung (University of Exeter) Emma Hogan (Met Office) Nicole Whippey (University of Exeter) Jack Feltham (Syngenta) Dan Clewley (Plymouth Marine Laboratory)
14:55	Closing5 min Tom Hawes, Fliss Guest
15:00	Informal pub trip Pub trip to Exeter’s famous orangery ( The Imperial, EX4 4AH ), conveniently located next to Exeter St. Davids station

Contact the organisers and other attendees

The easiest way to communicate with everyone is via the #rse-south-west channel on the UK RSE Slack instance.

If you would rather send us an email, please contact: rse-south-west-2026@exeter.ac.uk.

Acknowledgement

We’re grateful to the Society of Research Software Engineering for providing financial support for this meeting.

Society of RSE logo (resized), used with permission. See https://society-rse.org/trademark-and-logo-policy/ for terms of use.