Researchers have so many responsibilities beyond just research – teaching and supervising, reading and writing papers, designing and conducting experiments, sitting on committees, applying for grants – and yet more tasks are added to your list all the time. You also have to store and manage your research data, make your work open and reproducible, keep up with the latest AI trends to use them in your work or build them into your projects!

These tasks can seem overwhelming, unimportant and not related to your research goals. But never fear, Research IT Training service is here!

We run courses throughout the year dedicated to helping you make your research data, software and infrastructure easier. Many of us come from a research background so we understand the pressures of academic life and are committed to helping you find the right tool for the job, whether that’s automating the boring process of analysing a thousand survey responses or finding all the small circles in a thousand scans, or getting your code to run a thousand times faster on GPUs.

Here are some common issues we can help with:

• A new PhD student or researcher in your team has never used your favourite programming language? Send them to our introductory and intermediate courses in Python, R, and MATLAB!
• Code worked one week but broken the next week, or worked on your laptop but not on your desktop? Join us to learn about Version Control or Docker containers to make your work reproducible!
• Want to access our local supercomputer to work with big data sets, high-powered processors and GPUs? Come along to our Bash, HPC and CSF courses!
• Trying to write your thesis, perfectly align a presentation, or a collaborate on a paper and getting annoyed by Word/Powerpoint moving all your images around? Come learn how to use LaTeX, a professional typesetting tool which gives you full control and collaborate online using Overleaf.

All these courses are free to University of Manchester researchers (including PGRs) and run online or in-person throughout the year. If there are other skills you or your research group would like to learn or you’d like a course tailored to your research field, please get in touch through our Connect form. We’d love to hear from you and update our courses to the latest challenges in your field.