The Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC) at UW provides researchers and scholars with access to professional software engineers using  state of the art software and hardware to develop open-source, secure, robust, and sustainable software. ​​SSEC software engineers solve challenging  problems across a breadth of disciplinary domains by employing modern software development best-practices to build open source software at scale, leveraging cutting-edge  technologies including agentic-AI, generative-AI, machine learning, cloud computing, scalable deployment optimization, and peta-scale data management.  In collaboration with agencies and entities like the NSF and Schmidt Sciences, we are currently building agentic-AI systems for engineering, medicine, and science.  

In this call, we seek proposals for the design and development of agentic-AI software. This covers automating data workflows, integrating AI decision-making, and developing adaptive systems that learn from experiments and scholarly research data.  Proposals should demonstrate a clear understanding of the challenges in the science domain and ideally include structured ideas or prototypes for current solutions for addressing these challenges. Moreover, if you are considering or planning to submit a proposal for extramural funding to support similar work, we have a strong track record of success in partnership and co-creation of the research and software aims as co-investigators, thus far totaling over $10M.  

Selected projects will have close collaboration with SSEC research software engineers, who will work alongside research teams to co-design, build, and deploy effective solutions in an iterative engineering cycle. Our center emphasizes reproducibility, transparency, and long-term sustainability in all software development efforts, ensuring that the resulting tools are not only innovative but also reliable and accessible to the broader scientific community without the need for continued support from professional software engineers. We encourage applicants to outline how their proposed projects will promote open-science, foster collaboration, and impact a broad audience. 

Viable projects will start in Spring quarter and be 1-2 quarters in duration.  

To apply, please see the Expression of Interest (EOI) which describes the scope of work, science goals, and known or anticipated technical challenges. The ideal proposal will clearly identify the available funding source(s) if any, a preferred timeline, and ideas around sustaining the project long term. Currently, we cannot take on simple wrapper or outer loop projects that involve using a commercial generative model endpoint, like GPT-5 via an API call. Website development, proprietary file format conversion, or ongoing software maintenance is also out of scope.

Each project must identify a primary point of contact (e.g., PI or other senior group member) who will be responsive and available to connect weekly with the SSEC software engineering team and provide feedback, participate in code reviews and answer clarifying questions about the science use case. Additionally, for successful sustained engineering, it is ideal for each project to also identify a maintainer, or more ideally a community already established on GitHub, who have the technical skills to oversee the software beyond SSEC’s engagement. We find that open communication channels deepen technical engagement and support project success and sustainability.  

Important Dates for the SSEC Pilot Program: 

• For full consideration, please submit the EOI by Nov 24th at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time using this form, https://forms.office.com/r/BvPSdP7Xs9 

• Dec 8th: Notification of selected pilot projects. 

Software engineers make substantial contributions to projects we co-create and we expect that their work and the role of the UW Scientific Software Engineering Center will be properly attributed in any related talks, publications, software releases, etc., through co-authorship. 

For more information about previous SSEC projects visit, https://escience.washington.edu/software-engineering/ssec/ssec-project-archives/.  

For questions about the SSEC AI Pilot Program please contact ssec@uw.edu