Research IT

Announcing the new Deputy Head of RSE

Adrian Harwood, Head of Research Software Engineering, has announced that Chris Fullerton will take on the role of Deputy Head of Research Software Engineering starting in October 2025. Chris will also chair the new RSE Operational Excellence group.

Motivation to create a new role

When I started as Head of RSE in August 2022, I arrived in-post with a five-year plan I termed the Levelling-Up Programme (LUP). We are over halfway through that journey and although we have achieved a lot in terms of operational transformation against that plan, progress towards the goals has slowed.

Reflecting on causes, I realised that the most significant is pressure on my time and focus across an increasing number of activities in IT Services and Professional Services as well as national networks and projects. This results in in-house initiatives being held up as they await my review, steering or coordination.

I have also started up many new improvement activities alongside the LUP as the IT environment around us has changed in terms of risks and opportunities. Although leadership of these extra activities has been divided up among our senior engineers as technical leaders, they need coordinating and aligning, as well as unblocking.

Enter, a deputy Head of RSE and our new RSE Operational Excellence group.

This position is currently an assignment as opposed to a dedicated job role, although part of the assignment is to explore whether a dedicated role would be suitable and what that could look like in terms of a formal job description.

Introducing Chris

After a competitive, internal application process, including an interview with senior colleagues in Research IT, we appointed Chris Fullerton to the role of Deputy Head of RSE.

Chris joined the department as an RSE in March 2022 having previously held post-doctoral research positions in Physics at Bath and Montpellier, and Physiology at Oxford. Since joining the RSE team, he has worked in both HPC and AI fields including AI Foundry and, more recently, was the software engineering lead for the Turing Innovation Catalyst.

These opportunities have afforded Chris experience in the organisation, design and implementation of complex technical programmes, experience he now brings to the role of the Deputy Head of RSE role and the chairing of the new RSE Operational Excellence group.

RSE Operational Excellence Group

The primary role of the deputy Head of RSE is to chair a new Operational Excellence Group within the department. This will connect with the wider ITS Service Excellence group as well as the ITS Operations Committee, ensuring the RSE department is aligned to the wider Research IT and IT Service plans.

The new RSE Operational Excellence group will draw together all activities and initiatives in the department that are related to transformation and improvement (as opposed to the business-as-usual activities of service delivery). These include:

  • Levelling-Up Programme – a formal programme of initiatives started 3 years ago to transform key activities within the RSE department. You can read about it in our blog post.
  • Continuous Improvement – suggestions from members of the department for things we could do better, driving internal improvements, documentation and processes.
  • Agile Methods Working Group – the working group responsible for owning and developing our scrum-like project delivery approach and the training courses associated with it.
  • AI & ML Working Group – the working group responsible for orchestrating our activity around this technology area, tying in with the wider AI-Hub and the AI strategy sub-groups in research and professional services.
  • Department Tooling Working Group – the working group responsible for looking after our internal tooling including development and maintenance of our capacity management system, audit and monitoring of our deployed software assets and the state of the assets in terms of security, risk and compliance.
  • Automation Working Group – the working group responsible for improving the adoption of automation including Continuous Integration, testing and Continuous Deployment; typically, the use of GitHub Actions to increase code quality and working efficiency.
  • Web Hosting PaaS Working Group – the working group responsible for delivering a “one-click deploy” replacement for our web applications to replace our reliance on self-maintained virtual machines from the Research Virtual Machine Service.
  • Development Environment Working Group – the working group responsible for ensuring that RSEs have on-demand access to a suitable range of development environments; currently, a stable development environment is only available on the single laptop each RSE is provided by ITS which is not always practical for platform-specific project work.
  • Wagtail Development Stack (WaDS) – a technical stack used for creating lightweight web applications that require both a content management system and interactive elements; this stack comes with libraries, templates and tooling that needs development and maintenance to speed up the creation of research web apps.
  • Mobile Development Stack (MDS) – a technical stack used for creating mobile applications; this team also looks after the governance around the submission of mobile applications to the public stores under the University brand and is currently mobilising an automated web application to improve the end-user experience.

These activities are valuable parts of the department and embody its development and growth. The RSE Operational Excellence Group is therefore central to our mission to provide a world-leading RSE service to our research community and I’m excited to support Chris in leadership of these initiatives, and the talented RSEs in the team who contribute to their success.

Contact Us

If you would like to speak to us about costing RSE time onto your project, allowing you to benefit from the service improvements delivered by the new RSE Operational Excellence group, you can request our service on Connect, or email our Research Software Engineering mailbox.