Join the global Research Hardware Engineering community

The Research Hardware Engineering community has been founded as a peer to the Research Software Engineering community in looking to help establish and promote the role of professional hardware engineer career discipline within academia. As a community we need to come together, to gain a voice, and through community actions build that recognition of the role Research Hardware Engineers play in academia and to act as a positive force to increase the skills and capabilities in hardware design and engineering within academia and by association with our academic colleagues in education and research help increase the skills and capabilities in hardware design and engineering within society.


The Research Software Engineering community has become a global success since it started in 2012 growing from a small number of self declared engineers in the UK to over 10,000 registered engineers globally. Just as with the RSE community at the start, no one knows how many Research Hardware Engineers there are in academia. The only way to know is to establish the community and to reach out to connect everyone together. So if feel you are a Research Hardware Engineer within academia then please feel free to sign up and join us. More importantly, you probably know someone else who also feels they are a Research Hardware Engineer, please let them know about the community and help make the connections.

Are you a Research Hardware Engineer?

Regardless of your formal job title, if you answer yes to many of the following questions, you are doing the work of a Research Hardware Engineer:

  1. Are you employed to develop hardware for research?
  2. Are you spending more time developing hardware than conducting research?
  3. Are you employed as a postdoctoral researcher, even though you predominantly work on hardware development?
  4. Are you the person who does hardware design and development in your research group?
  5. Are you sometimes not named on research papers despite playing a fundamental part in developing the hardware used to create them?
  6. Do you feel you lack the metrics needed to progress your academic career, like papers and conference presentations, despite having made a significant contribution through design, fabrication or testing of hardware?

You are most likely a Research Hardware Engineer.