Working with you rather than for you

Now that research software engineering is an established role in some universities and countries it is easy to forget how difficult it was for engineers to work on research they love but really focus on the software development side rather than the academic research. In this interview Paul Richmond describes how he “masqueraded” as academic before he got the fellowship at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - EPSRC in the UK. Since then he established himself firmly as an RSE and built a team of engineers at the university of Sheffield in the UK. His main focus has been on GPU programming, e.g. multi agent based simulation software using FLAME GPU. Since the early days, Paul has been an active member of the RSE community. And in late 2020 he was elected president of the Society for Research Software Engineering in the UK, following in the footsteps of Alys Brett.