Lasair team members win IOP 2024 Technician Award

 The pair have been praised for their internationally recognised technical expertise, exceptional software skills and dedication to astrophysics. Reacting to the news, Dave (pictured below, right) said: “Winning any award is a delight, but it's even more special to be recognised via the nominations of colleagues, the people I work with every day. The award reflects not only Ken and my individual achievements but also underscores the remarkable teamwork of the groups we work with, the Lasair team being a prime example.”

Ken (below left) added: “Being nominated by colleagues is even more satisfying than actually winning anything. Our software is also built on a foundation of work by the IT management staff within Astrophysics at Queen's University Belfast, without whom we can’t run any service, so this award recognises them as much as us!”

Ken said: “Over the years, the work we do has evolved from providing bespoke transient object discovery services within the internationally based Pan-STARRS and ATLAS teams to contributing to the development of the transient broker service Lasair for LSST. I feel a little embarrassed to receive special recognition when so much of Lasair’s core development and deployment is done by my colleagues in the team, especially at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh. We’re excited and slightly apprehensive at the volume of data that Lasair will need to handle when the telescope is commissioned in 2025.”

"Not your typical software developers"

According to Dave, when he and Ken first started developing software to help enable academics to do better science, they had difficulty explaining their amorphous responsibilities to others. “Chasing citations has never been our primary aim, but nor would we describe ourselves as typical software developers. Unbeknownst to me, the same month I started my role, a group of similar academics-come-developers met at Queen's College Oxford to discuss their collective identity crisis. There, they coined the term Research Software Engineer (RSE) – both succinctly defining their roles and unwittingly birthing a global movement. 

“More than a decade after that fateful meeting, thanks in part to the tireless campaigning of the Software Sustainability Institute, many universities now host their own dedicated RSE groups. Presently, wonderfully creative initiatives like the HiddenREF are helping to raise the profile of many other under-recognised roles within academia under the 'Research Technical Professionals' (RTP) umbrella term. For early career researchers, the career path options on offer are becoming refreshingly diverse.”