ARC as a Research Department

ARC’s core work includes the operation of the platform services that underpin computational science both in UCL and nationally, as well as the delivery of expertise into computational science projects across UCL through its pool of staff scientists in research software engineering, data science, research infrastructure, digital research management, and data stewardship. 

However, as a hybrid department, ARC is also charged with teaching and training in the methods of computational science, and ARC-led research into the fundamentals of the methods of digital research. We innovate in the field of the application of digital methods to all fields of research, developing, designing and maintaining novel tools, practices and systems to enable computational science and digital scholarship. ARC staff act as project leads and co-leads on research grants, and may supervise PhD students, especially in our new doctoral training centre. 

These aspects are synergistic. Our research activities inform the design and development of our services. Our collaborative involvement in research led by others both gives us a user’s perspective on our own services and generates methodological questions which we pursue, so that we become more effective collaborators. 

Why does our research activity not sit within an academic faculty? Dominant research metrics ill-fit activities whose primary research outputs are software and well-curated datasets, rather than publications, creating well-known career development issues for research technologists inside academic departments. Instituting ARC within an existing faculty would over-incentivise the development of fully independent research portfolios, putting it in conflict with existing academic groups. In contrast, ARC’s approach makes a strong virtue of a very interdisciplinary and team-based approach to research. It is in collaborative research, as “middle authors”, that ARC’s research mission is focused. 

Some of our research areas do have overlap with activities of other UCL departments. The rationale is not to create competition but to create complementary research activities that are beneficial to similar research across UCL. Wherever possible we will conduct research jointly with others. 

We work across the application of software, data and compute intensive methods to science and scholarship. These topics align with ARC’s collaborative research activity groupings and service teams, seeking to generalise project work, exploit synergies, or advance the methods used. Some are cross-cutting themes identified by staff as capturing multiple activities that reflect modern research trends in computational and e-sciences. Topics studied include: digital research practices, and their impact on research communities; research policy, cultures and methods for collaborative digital research; FAIR; reproducible digital research; novel compute, network and storage technologies; open-source research toolkits; data-driven research; trusted research environments; and secure scientific computing. The tiles below provide more details of our groups and their expertise.