STFC Software Engineer Jessica Huntley has won the Green RSE Award at RSECon26, held from 9th-11th September in Sheffield.
Jessica Huntley at the Energy Efficient Computing Workshop, September 2026
The flagship event of the Society of Research Software Engineering and the research software community, RSECon provides an annual forum to share ideas, debate strategies, and develop collective visions for the future of Research Software Engineering.
Jessica leads the Energy Efficiency Team at Scientific Computing (SC) at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). She successfully made the case for funding from the department, and the team are now responsible for the department’s sustainability strategy. Jess was vital in SC becoming the first STFC department to be awarded Green DiSC accreditation.
Funded by CoSeC to pioneer sustainability work across Collaborative Computational Projects (CCPs), Jessica is also a NetDRIVE champion, and the principal investigator of a NetDRIVE community project, which will develop targeted, practical information to embed best practice for the measurement and effective use of carbon emissions data across Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI). Despite her many responsibilities, this work is all in addition to her role as an early career research software engineer.
She has designed and supervised numerous graduate projects related to carbon monitoring of different SC services and now oversees multiple working groups carrying out the sustainability strategy across themes such as best practice and user education. Jessica is a member of the STFC Green Groups Network, and works collaboratively with the STFC Environmental Sustainability team, the UKRI Environmental Sustainability Programme, and external consulting groups such as ARUP.
Jessica has active projects and collaborations in her department, STFC, CoSeC, and UKRI, giving her a unique ability to influence change at essentially all levels of scientific computing. She achieves this through the many presentations and workshops she has organised representing these organisations (including the Energy Efficient Computing Workshop held last year), the development of software tools, training, working groups, and the research she carries out, such as profiling common mathematical libraries that are used across DRI.
Sarah Hanrahan (Hartree Centre) and David McDonagh (CCP4), who nominated Jessica says, “What impressed the panel most about Jess is that her work has emphasised bringing together different communities, such as different departments in STFC through combined workshops and grants, different CCPs in CoSeC, and multiple NetDrive projects as a NetDrive champion, to ensure information sharing and maximum impact of sustainability projects across scientific computing.”