The UW Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC) at the eScience Institute leverages local software engineering talent to advance scientific frontiers.
We help researchers create sustainable software solutions. SSEC is a diverse team of software engineers who work with UW scientists on impactful research projects, infusing them with the software industry’s best practices, and delivering open source, reusable software that will accelerate future research in areas like climate, health, energy and basic science.
Led by Director David Beck and Head of Engineering Vani Mandava , SSEC is structured around applied machine learning for science, cloud computing and data management, and community building around scientific software.
Learn more about SSEC’s work on GitHub.
Our collaborative projects create open source, reusable scientific software
Our team brings their software engineering experience to the world of scientific research
SSEC collaborates with researchers to produce peer-reviewed publications across a variety of disciplines
SSEC is engaged in various AI initiatives to explore how research can leverage the new wave of Generative AI innovation
SSEC News and Events
- RAG Office Hours for Winter Quarter 2025 take place every Tuesday from 10:00 – 11:00 a.m. in the WRF Data Science Studio
- “Caustics: A Python Package for Accelerated Strong Gravitational Lensing Simulations” (The Journal of Open Source Software, November 2024)
- “Interoperable and scalable echosounder data processing with Echopype” (ICES Journal of Marine Science, October 2024)
“Now we have an environment where we can literally share, not the code, but we can share everything. And somebody else clicks a few buttons and then they’re instantly in my research environment and they have everything running perfectly. So for sharing work in the lab, it’s been a massive deal, and it’s what me and everybody I work with use to collaborate. It’s made a huge difference in what I do every day.”
— Matt Elliot, UCSC Genomics Institute
“I’ve been stress-testing GNATSS with processing real-time data we are currently collecting, and it is performing admirably. I think it is running better than the original software, which I would not have expected considering the differences between Python and Fortran.”
— John de Santo, Postdoctoral Scholar, UW Earth and Space Sciences
“Our work developing software with SSEC has taken away a lot of the manual effort required in developing new diagnostics, resulting in almost 3x efficiency gains.”
— Misa Winters, Acting Director of Molecular Innovation and Operations, Conservation X Labs
Special thanks to our sponsor: Schmidt Sciences