About
'Which came first the chicken or the egg?'. If we apply this thought to our own discipline, which came first the hardware or the software? Does it matter?
In our case it is the software engineers that came first. In looking to establish and promote the role of Research Hardware Engineers in academia we can look with pride at our older sibling, the Research Software Engineers. They were born first and have laid the path for us to follow and tackled many of our challenges.
The founding fathers of the 'Research Software Engineer' community recognised the importance of professionalising the role of those people who choose to stay within, or even return to, academia to develop critical software engineering capabilities in academia.
But what are Research Hardware Engineers?
Plagerising from our older sibling we simply pronounce...
"A Research Hardware Engineer (RHE) combines professional hardware engineering expertise with an intimate understanding of research".
The role of the 'Research Hardware Engineer' in academia, like that of the 'Research Software Engineer' is poorly recognised and supported in academia. The community needs 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.
We need to develop a bridge between the Research Hardware Engineering community in academia and the broader Hardware Engineering community in industry and help in the challenge of providing the hardware engineering solutions to the broader societies challenges. As Research Hardware Engineers we need to grow up, perhaps with the help of our older sibling, to take our place in academia and in society and to be the best representatives of our growing profession of Research Hardware Engineers.
If you are interested in the history of our older sibling's challenge in establishing the 'Research Software Engineer' community please read the not-so-brief-history-research-software-engineers (link) by Simon Hettrick.
Thank you Simon for the inspiration to help found the Research Hardware Engineering community in academia.
A formal definition?
Many engineers seek to have clarity and formality to definitions but how shall we define a Research Hardware Engineer? As always we look as a role model to the Research Software Engineering community. We can start with their view (link) and adopt it. For sure this will evolve as the community develops.
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:
- Are you employed to develop hardware for research?
- Are you spending more time developing hardware than conducting research?
- Are you employed as a postdoctoral researcher, even though you predominantly work on hardware development?
- Are you the person who does hardware design and development in your research group?
- Are you sometimes not named on research papers despite playing a fundamental part in developing the hardware used to create them?
- 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.
The community is happy to develop this view of a Research Hardware Engineer. Perhaps we won't get to a formal description but that what often inspires us as engineers, to take ill defined requirements and use our engineering capabilities to refined a simple but robust solution.