EPCC's Chris Wood wins SocRSE Education and Training Award
29 October 2026
Each year, the Society of Research Software Engineering (SocRSE) recognises the achievements of its members at the Research Software Engineering conference. At this year's conference, held in Sheffield, EPCC’s Chris Wood was announced as winner of the Education and Training Award.
The award was primarily given in recognition of the training series "Essential Scientific Computing for Environmental Scientists" (ESCES), which Chris Wood organised and ran to teach scientific computing skills to environmental and life scientists. Funding via three UKRI-NERC Advanced Short Training Course grants enabled the courses to be offered for free, and travel and accommodation costs were also covered for the majority of attendees.
Twenty-five individual ESCES courses have now been delivered to approximately 500 researchers. Although the majority of the content was based on Software Carpentry material, Chris was keen to ensure the examples were modified to be more relevant to the intended audience, thereby lowering the cognitive load of the learners. The courses were significantly oversubscribed, which meant they could be delivered more frequently through the ESCES3 grant than originally planned, so increasing the number of people able to take advantage of this opportunity.
Chris also introduced optional "Bring your own data" days to some courses, allowing researchers and PhD students to access support from the courses’ training team that may not have been available from their own supervisors or research group.
Chris hopes to run another round of these courses from summer 2027, depending on the availability of suitable funding.