Building open, reusable, and sustainable scientific software — with researchers, for discovery.
The Scientific Software Engineering Center is part of the University of Washington eScience Institute. We pair professional software engineers with researchers across disciplines to embed software engineering best practices into scientific work, and to ship open-source tools that continue to serve the community long after our engagements end.
Founded in January 2022 through a Schmidt Sciences initiative, SSEC is one of a small number of centers nationally dedicated to growing scientific software engineering as a discipline.
- Home: https://escience.washington.edu/software-engineering/ssec/
- About the Center: https://escience.washington.edu/software-engineering/ssec/about-2/
- Project portfolio: https://escience.washington.edu/software-engineering/ssec/ssec-project-archives/
- Collaborate with research teams to design, build, and harden software that powers scientific inquiry.
- Lay durable open-source foundations so principal investigators, students, and communities can carry projects forward.
- Scale research software engineering (RSE) culture through training, tutorials, and mentorship of graduate research scholars.
- Explore AI for science through our AI Hub initiative — applying generative AI to accelerate research and developer productivity.
We work across domains including astronomy, oceanography, seismology, genetics, ecology, biodiversity, bioethics, medicine, energy, education, and disaster response.
A curated slice of our active and recently archived work. See the full portfolio for everything else.
| Project | Domain | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| antenna | Ecology / Education | AI-powered insect camera-trap toolset for conservation research |
| bioethics | Bioethics / Medicine | Generates plain-language lay summaries of academic research for study participants |
| biodiversity-horizons | Ecology | Predicts biodiversity risks under climate change scenarios |
| HPyX | HPC / Software Engineering | Brings high-performance parallelism to Python |
| ovro-lwa-portal | Astronomy | Accessible data platform for the Owens Valley Long Wavelength Array |
| protein-design-pipelines | Genetics / Bioethics | Reproducible pipelines aligning model developers and protein designers |
| idd-database | Medicine | Centralized data portal for intellectual and developmental disability research |
| caustics | Astronomy | Gravitational lensing simulator for the ML era |
| phylo2vec | Genetics | Vector representation for binary phylogenetic trees |
| SafeMind | Mental Health / AI Safety | Safer GenAI for mental health via lived-experience–grounded simulation |
| llmaven | AI / NAIRR | NAIRR-backed AI gateway exploring LLM infrastructure for researchers |
| rse-plugins | Developer Tooling | Research software engineering plugins for coding agents |
- tutorials — SSEC tutorials on scientific computing, cloud, and AI topics
- rse-guidelines — Research software engineering guidelines we follow and evolve
All of our work is open by default. Before opening a PR, please read:
- CONTRIBUTING.md — how we collaborate, branch, review, and ship
- CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md — the community standards we hold ourselves to
New contributors are welcome. Issues labeled good first issue on individual repositories are a great place to start.
- Researchers interested in partnering with SSEC: see Get involved with SSEC.
- Students interested in our Graduate Research Scholar program: reach out through the eScience Institute.
- Community questions and discussions: use the Discussions tab on any of our repositories.
SSEC is supported by Schmidt Sciences and hosted within the UW eScience Institute. We partner with research groups across UW and with collaborators internationally.
The resulting tools are open source and reusable, designed to sustain discovery beyond SSEC's involvement in the projects.
