US-RSE June 2025 Newsletter

🔍 This Month: A Peek at the US-RSE Website — What Brings You Here? 🔍

newsletter June

Published: Jun 29, 2025 by Tinashe M. Tapera

Welcome to this month’s edition of the US-RSE Newsletter! A few weeks ago, I found myself wondering: Who visits the US-RSE website? What are they looking for? How are they finding us? To satisfy that curiosity, I took a dive into our Google Analytics data, and uncovered some interesting patterns. In this issue, we’ll explore a few highlights from our website traffic that offer a glimpse into how our community is connecting with US-RSE online, and consider what these insights might mean for the future of our digital presence.

Group of RSEs stock photo

In this issue:

🔔 1. US-RSE Conference 2025 (USRSE’25)

USRSE25 Banner

Are you making plans to join us in 🦅 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 🦅 October 6-8, 2025? The theme for the third annual conference from the United States Research Software Engineer Association (US-RSE) is “Code, Practices, and People.”

Thank you to all who have submitted work for this conference! Reviews are still underway and notifications should be sent by July 14. Registration opened in late June. Check out our registration page for information on rates and for the link to register through Eventbrite.

While the submission deadline for most formats has passed, we continue to invite poster submissions for USRSE’25. Poster submissions will be accepted through July 20.

Whether you’re a research software engineer, data scientist, digital humanist, scientific programmer, software developer, or research software user, US-RSE is where people at the intersection of code and research come together. The USRSE’25 conference is your chance to connect with peers, mentors, and experts in the fast-growing world of research software. Don’t just take our word for it—100% of last year’s post-conference survey respondents said they would return and recommend the conference to others.

Visit the conference website for further details including:

  • Venue, hotel, registration, and travel details
  • Posters: how and where to submit (still have questions? contact usrse2025@easychair.org)
  • Dates for notification of acceptance and other important dates

🔍 2. A Peek at the US-RSE Website — What Brings You Here?

Web analytics is a fascinating and exciting application of data science involving the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize website usage. Using a few simple techniques and powerful tools like Google Analytics 4, organizations like ours can learn incredible insights about who visits our website, what they do with it, and why. So, what does the US-RSE.org website data over the last 12 months tell us about ourselves?

Top Pages

When not accounting for the home page, we can see that the jobs page is the most utilized resource on the website. This is closely followed by conference page resources:

Top Pages

I believe this reflects the current job market in the tech and academic world. At US-RSE, we are committed to connecting talented individuals with exciting opportunities, so we try to automate and streamline the process as much as we can with a Job Board bot on Slack for job seekers, and and an easy-to-use job posting form for job posters. It’s encouraging to see that our job board is a valuable resource for our community.

Geography

The US makes up the vast majority of our traffic, of course. But get this — we have page views pinging from 153 different countries and territories, including Northern Mariana Islands, Slovakia, Tajikstan, and Zimbabwe. However, we have to consider the possibility of bots, crawlers, and VPNs inflating these numbers, so we should take this with a grain of salt.

Geography

Devices & Browsers

As you’d expect, most visitors come from desktop devices, with the most popular browsers being Chrome and Safari.

Devices

What surprises me is the poor representation of privacy-focused tools like Firefox, Opera, and Brave. Perhaps online privacy consciousness would be an interesting topic for a future community call?

Bounce Rate & Engagement

We found that overall the average engagement time per active user per month is 1m 06s. Per session of using our site, the average engagement time is only 38 seconds. This is quite low, and may suggest that visitors are mostly landing at the site in order to redirect elsewhere (such as during a job search). So, it begs the question: how can we improve the experience on the website to encourage users to visit and stay longer, and ultimately explore more? What do you expect to interact with when you visit the US-RSE website? How can we make visiting the site more valuable for you? Let us know by pinging the Slack #website channel…

That being said, this writer is proud to report that our website has had an overall increase in traffic since we reinvigorated the newsletter in March.

Trends

New vs. Returning Visitors

The comparison between new and returning visitors is a great way to measure the growth of our community. We can see that the number of returning users spikes quickly after the conference, and dwindles slowly as people move on to other things. New user attraction should be a priority, however, so we should think about ways to keep that post conference momentum going.

New Visitors Returning Visitors

Conclusion

Web analytics can offer a valuable snapshot of how a community and visiting audiences engage with a digital organization. For us, the data highlights the importance of our job board, and the (potentially) global reach of our resources, but also points out opportunities to improve engagement and retention. And this is just a basic breakdown of stock charts provided by the Google Analytics4 service… what more could we uncover as we dig into deeper data points?

As US-RSE continues to grow, your feedback will be essential in shaping the tools, resources, and interfaces we implement for the community. So, we ask you — what would make the US-RSE website more useful? Share your thoughts in the #website Slack channel by joining the org and signing up to the slack group Slack here. Together, we can make us-rse.org an even more vibrant hub for research software engineers!

🛞 3. Steering Committee Updates

Over the past month, the Steering Committee approved the 2025 US-RSE Community Awards program proposed by the Community Awards Working Group. We continued discussions on the US-RSE response to the changing federal funding landscape, and reaffirmed that providing an inclusive environment with equitable treatment for all remains a core part of our mission. We received an update on fundraising efforts from the Executive Director and reviewed our budget for the upcoming fiscal year. Finally, we further defined tasks and priorities for a new Community Manager, identified chairs for the USRSE’26 conference, and addressed some administrative issues regarding our processes for posting to social media and sending email announcements.

🤝 4. Organizational Founding Membership

US-RSE envisions a future where Research Software Engineers are universally respected for advancing science, technology, and society through the transformative power of research software engineering. We’re excited to share that the momentum around our Organizational Founding Membership continues to grow! See the list below for the current members (six more are onboarding at the moment).

Organizations that join on or before November 30, 2025, will be recognized in perpetuity as founding members. Founding organizations will also lock in current membership fees through December 31, 2028. Organizational support helps sustain and expand vital community offerings, including the annual conference, monthly calls and newsletter, job board, working groups, and new resources.

Please reach out to Sandra Gesing at sandra@us-rse.org if you are interested in becoming an organizational founding member!

Premier Members

Standard Members

Basic Members

✈️ 4. Community and Travel Funds program

Part of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for US-RSE has been delegated for the Community and Travel Funds program. Members of US-RSE can apply for funds for community or individual purposes for event costs, get-togethers, travel funding, and more.

The next application deadline is December 31, 2026. We encourage you to apply for funding to support your community and travel needs!
The application process is simple and straightforward. You can find the application form here.

🗞️ 6. Community News

Community Calls

During our last community call, we got some great suggestions for future topics, including lots of interest in learning about the US-RSE community, careers, and funding. Our July community call on Thursday, July 10, 12pm ET/11am CT/10am MT/9am PT will cover all of these topics (and maybe more!).

If you’d like to give a brief 3-5 minute talk on your story, we’d be happy to hear from you. This could be talking about what your current role is and what you’re working on, how you’re funded, or the path you took to get where you are today. Even if you’re not an RSE, you’re here, so you’re part of our community, and we’d love to hear what you do and how your work relates to RSE.

Please reach out to Julia Damerow or Abbey Roelofs via Slack if you’re interested in presenting, and visit the Community Calls Website for more information and to access the registration link.

June Community Call

In our last community call, we discussed the use of AI tools in research software engineering. From the Mentimeter poll, we learned that the majority of you are using AI tools once or twice a day for — obviously — coding support, and that you believe that if AI became sentient, the first thing it would do is… worship cats…? Y’know, sounds about right 🐈

👀 7. Interesting Events and Opportunities

🦄 They Arrived as a Herd… But They’re Ready to Travel to You! 🚀

The 2025 US-RSE magical unicorns have officially arrived!

US-RSE Unicorn

They came as a herd, packed together in a carton, just like how research software engineers come together to build a stronger community. But now, these unicorns are ready to set off on their own journeys—finding new homes with RSEs, allies, and supporters like you.

This year’s edition proudly wears a red shirt featuring the US-RSE logo integrated with 2025, symbolizing another year of growth, collaboration, and impact. Just like our community, these unicorns remind us that while we each have our own paths, we are part of something bigger—a movement dedicated to advancing research software and supporting those who make it happen.

By adopting a unicorn, you’re not just getting a fun desk companion—you’re also supporting US-RSE’s mission to strengthen the RSE community, advocate for recognition, and create more opportunities for collaboration.

📦 Limited supply—once they leave the herd, they’re gone!

🚚 They’ll ship for free within the US! 🚚

If you're from another country and want to get your hands on a unicorn, reach out to us, and we'll find out whether we can arrange shipping for you.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to own a piece of US-RSE magic and donate to get your Unicorn 2025 Edition today. This edition will be available while supplies last until December 10, 2025 ✨🦄✨

👉 https://give.communityin.org/unicorn2025?ref=ab_20w0PysS59P20w0PysS59P

📚 8. Featured Reads, Videos, and Podcasts

📑 Recent Publications

  • N. Kosmyna, E. Hauptmann, Y. T. Yuan, J. Situ, X.-H. Liao, A. V. Beresnitzky, I. Braunstein, P. Maes, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:2506.08872, 2025. Read the article.

Editor’s Note: This study investigates the neural and behavioral effects of using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT for essay writing, and stirred up quite some discussion on slack. Using EEG and NLP analysis, the authors found that reliance on LLMs is associated with reduced brain connectivity, diminished memory recall, and lower self-reported ownership of written work, which suggests that long-term use may incur cognitive costs and hinder learning. Even as I write this newsletter, I find myself using an LLM to help me write liquid code snippets, quickly format HTML, and edit wording. This article is extremely timely and well worth a read as we continue to understand the potential effects of LLMs on our wellbeing.

  • O. J. R. Gustafsson, S. R. Wilkinson, F. Bacall, S. Soiland-Reyes, S. Leo, L. Pireddu, S. Owen, N. Juty, J. M. Fernández, T. Brown, H. Ménager, B. Grüning, S. Capella-Gutierrez, F. Coppens, C. Goble, “WorkflowHub: a registry for computational workflows,” Scientific Data, Vol. 12, Article 837, 2025. Read the article.

  • B. Bruntink, “A Multimodal Machine Learning Approach for Automated Research Software Classification,” Master’s thesis, Utrecht University, 2025. Read the thesis.

  • Y. Xia, S.-R. Tsai, M. Turk, “DeepGit: Promoting Exploration and Discovery of Research Software with Human-Curated Graphs,” 2025. Read the paper.

📝 Blog Posts

  • L. Parsons, “US-RSE Celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride,” US-RSE.org, Jun 13, 2025. Read the post.

  • L. Parsons, “US-RSE Pride Month Spotlight - Edith Windsor,” US-RSE.org, Jun 16, 2025. Read the post.

  • C. Brown, “We Hosted a Workshop for Practitioners—No One Came,” Code World, No Blanket, Jun 5, 2025. Read the post.

  • T. Ptacek, “My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts,” fly.io, Jun 2, 2025. Read the post.

🎧 Podcast Highlights

Recent episodes from the #code4thought podcast:

  • Parsl: a Python library for parallel programming - with Dan Katz and Ben Clifford Listen here

  • Open Research - at FOSDEM 2025 Listen here

🏃 9. Get Involved

US-RSE Working Groups:

🧑‍💼 10. Recent Job Postings

Other Job Boards

This newsletter is a joint effort of members of the US-RSE Association.

© US-RSE • 2021–2026 • US-RSE is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives

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