Jo won a Fellowship from the Institute of Research Software in 2025. It came with a budget of 4000 GBP to support community development activity in research culture (focused on attending and organising events)
There were a few talks during the Fellowship and there's a separate site for the Better Hardware talk slides and links which includes one recorded panel session.
Here's the 3-minute lightning talk summary of the Fellowship, prepared for the Institute of Research Software All Fellows Community Call in October 2026:
My Fellowship was on the theme of "Better Hardware, Better Research" - how can we treat research hardware like we treat research software, open source and reproducible for open science? I proposed a series of workshops bringing environmental researchers into hackerspaces, with different collaborators. I didn't know much about the topic when I proposed it, and quickly discovered many "pockets of excellence" and active groups.
The Fellowship fund supported three workshops, and paid for me to help at another, run by a group at Imperial. It also paid for me to speak at two conferences. The workshops were all managed and run by other people - I only made it in-person to one of them. They all had great follow-up activity - led separately to a startup, a workshop at a hacker festival, and seeded an international collaboration.
The programme didn't have the impact on UK research that I wanted, but rather came to an abrupt halt. I worked on a couple of linked funding applications to support more workshops, but inadvertently breached institutional policy, which led to disciplinary action. I stopped developing the project, turned down professional development support that I'd already secured through the EPCC CHARTED fund, and passed up an offer of internal funding to develop a coding course for field engineers, building on Carpentries material.
I'm now in a different role and though it's not research-related at all, I'm optimistic about finding new ways to resume - I had an unusually strong belief in it, enough to justify making the effort in my free time. All this motivates me to share some advice with current and future Fellows:
- If you are making work-adjacent effort in your free time and the outcome is open source, get explicit approval to release it. Talk to your employers' business development or legal people and get something in writing. If you can't, then just change your project.
- Socialise your work early with senior / executive leadership, the highest level you can reach. Restructures happen, hierarchies change; the only person whose job it is to advocate for you is you.