Episode 187: Karthik Ram on Research Software Sustainability

Guest Karthik Ram Panelists Richard Littauer | Abby Cabunoc Mayes Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. In this episode, Richard and Abby are joined by guest Karthik Ram, a research scientist at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science and Berkeley Initiative for Global Change Biology, as well as co-founder and director of the rOpenSci Project, and lead at URSSI. Karthik’s journey from field ecologist to data scientist has propelled him into roles that advocate for sustainable scientific software and open science. He currently manages projects, fundraises, and mentors while also overseeing initiatives aimed at developing best practices in software development, advocating for supporting policy, building user and developer communities. He emphasizes the significance of reproducibility and sustainability in research software and offers an empowering approach to maintaining academic software. Hit download to hear much more! [00:02:00] Karthik explains what he does as a senior data scientist, and he tells us that he views himself as an “engineering manager” rather than an individual contributor. [00:03:01] His transition from a field ecologist to a data scientist was triggered by handling large amounts of data and developing software to work with it. [00:06:21] The conversation turns to the JOSS, the Journal of Open Source Science, and Karthik shares the origin story for the software review process. [00:09:03] Karthik dives into the UC Berkeley’s Science Institute, he tells us how it started, and what his role was there. [00:11:11] Karthik’s involved with the URSSI, where they aim to collect and disseminate best practices in software development, advocate for supporting policy at a national level, and grow user and develop communities around their projects. [00:12:55] One of the projects coming up in the fall for URSSI is they’re going to run a school for research software engineering. [00:15:16] Karthik and Kyle assembled a course focus