On 11 November, Research IT (RIT) and colleagues from the Software Sustainability Institute based at Manchester took part in the University of Manchester’s Computer Science Careers Fair. The event attracted many students, from first-year undergraduates to postgraduates and researchers, who were keen to understand what their future careers could look like and how they might begin shaping them.

Recently, members of Research IT spent a day volunteering with PLANT-MCR, a local gardening co-operative that transforms neglected urban spaces into vibrant green areas. Supported by the University's volunteering leave policy, the team took part in garden maintenance and planting across several city sites, strengthening team bonds and inspiring a renewed commitment to community volunteering.

The extensive range of centralised IT services now available to the University's research community might be easy to take for granted, but a brief reflection on the history of IT for research at the University reveals a remarkable journey.

The Research Software Engineering (RSE) team has created a new online database to allow clinicians to track symptoms and treatments for patients with Alopecia Areata. This blog post discusses the technical decisions we made to guarantee the availability and security of patient data during the pilot phase of this project.

At the start of year Research IT commissioned Open Data Manchester to undertake a series of strategy finding workshops with members of the research community from across the University. The report generated from the outcomes of the workshops is now available and we'd like to hear your thoughts.

Back in June we announced some changes in Research IT management. We are now pleased to announce that, following the recent open competition, Robert Haines has been appointed as Head of Research IT.

Our Research IT function is a key partner for many of the University’s research community and has never been in such high demand. In fact the demand has increased by around 75% over the last two years!

Angus Hearmon, as our Head of Research IT, has also seen his remit grow. To continue to meet demand appropriately, it has been decided to split the responsibilities of the Head of Research IT in to two roles.

New researcher or PGR student at the University of Manchester? Completely confused about Research IT? Come along to a drop-in session and speak to members of the Research IT team face to face!

Have you wondered how to feed your views into Research IT? Have you wondered what the research input to Research IT is? How do we plan and take researcher’s views and concerns into account? To find out more about Research IT governance and who your School representatives are, click on each Governance Board name.

Research IT has been providing the SpiNNaker project with research software engineer (RSE) expertise to help them simulate billions of simple neurons in order to create brain inspired computing systems.