How research engineers with experience in the field can better help research teams

Roel Brouwer’s PhD thesis at Utrecht University is about developing algorithms for demand and supply in electricity networks. Traditionally, the supply of energy to the energy network follows the demand. That means, if more energy is required by consumers or by companies, more energy is generated by the energy suppliers.

Having a job while working on your PhD thesis

During the time Roel worked on his PhD thesis research at the department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University, he also worked at ITS in the research engineering team at the same university. At times, this was not always easy, since the subject of his research did not coincide with his work as research engineer.

Currently, supply is far less predictable than it was in the past due to factors such as consumers and companies using their own solar panels, which feed energy into the grid whenever the sun is shining. Conversely, demand has become more controllable, as individuals can choose to charge electric vehicles during the day when there is an abundance of solar energy, when electricity is cheaper. For the energy network to function smoothly, supply and demand must be perfectly balanced at all times. Roel’s thesis investigates these issues by focusing on the efficient planning of electricity demand. More information about this can be read in his PhD thesis. Roel has had his PhD thesis defense “The Power of Scheduling: the Scheduling of Power” on July 8, 2024.

If you have a job and do your PhD research at the same time, make sure that the job and the research are in line with each other as much as possible

Knowing what researchers struggle with

One of the things he has discovered while working as a research engineer, is that it really helps to have experience with doing research yourself. You are familiar with the process of doing research, and you are aware of some of the challenges one can encounter while doing research. For example, what does it take to write a scientific article, or how much time does it really take to make your data or software open and FAIR? It seems easy to say “that data and software should be open”, but it is better to understand what it takes to make that possible, and to have done it yourself.

The most important skill you need to complete a PhD is perseverance

Interaction between engineering teams and research groups

Roel has also noticed that one of the strengths of the research engineering team is that the team learns while doing their work for a research group. The research engineers gain knowledge they re-use when they are working for other research groups. The knowledge of the team is on a more general level, since this allows them to help more people. They collaborate with researchers, who bring their own specialized knowledge to the table, to do projects that require expertise in several subjects.

Examples of recent projects the research engineering team has done, are:

• The Botanical Gardens has a collection of historical seed lists dating back to 1837, in the form of PDF’s and scanned documents. The project aims to unlock the information in these seed lists and to make it available to research teams, enabling them to study collection policies over the centuries and to detect possible effects of climate change on the collection. The result of the project is a pipeline that can be used by other botanical institutes.
• The research engineering team collaborated with the faculty of Humanities on a project called “Babble”. This was a project on automated processing and classification of audio recordings from children in the YOUth project. In this project, speech classification and machine learning techniques have been combined.
• An overview of other research engineering projects can be found here.

Open science and FAIR principles

The research engineering team supports open science and the FAIR principles, and aims that the final product of every project to be in line with these ideas as much as possible. Roel has noticed that sometimes research teams are a bit hesitant about making their code publicly accessible. These teams think the quality of their code is not “good” enough. Or they do not want others to use the code before they have fully finished working on it themselves. Roel recommends that Utrecht University should continue to emphasize and draw more attention to the fact that the development of software and data should be recognized as a scientific activity. This aligns with the "Vision on Recognition and Rewards".

Several steps have already been taken to make this happen. However, increased communication with research teams, explaining the benefits of this approach, may further promote openness and adherence to FAIR principles.