Sponsorship

The UK’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) Conference is the largest RSE conference in the world. Organisers maximise attendance by keeping ticket prices low, which means the conference provides an unparalleled opportunity to network with RSEs – the technical decision makers in research – from the UK and from around the world.

Sponsorship Packages

We offer five sponsorship tiers. Package availability is limited, please get in touch early to secure your preferred tier.

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Why Your Company Should Sponsor Us

The RSE Conference offers a great opportunity for sponsors to advertise their products, business and goals to a large audience spanning industrial and academic domains. Despite its relative youth, RSE has become a strategically important role in research. The UK Government’s current focus on Digital Research Infrastructure, prioritising data and computational efficiency and security across all research and innovation challenges, drives significant investments in this area.

Attendees come from all backgrounds and disciplines across research, including: High-Performance Computing in the physical sciences and engineering, cloud-computing web platforms for reproducible research infrastructure, Trusted Research Environments for health research, machine-learning in the digital humanities and much more.

Your Potential Audience

Over 400 attendees will be gathered at the University of Sheffield in September 2026. They typically include most if not all of the leaders of UK RSE Groups, heads of research IT, program/project managers from universities responsible for TOP500 HPC procurement contracts and university-wide software licensing, leaders from national research institutes, and senior staff from the research software and hardware divisions of both startups and major businesses.

Alongside RSEs, there will be leading researchers and technical experts, PhD students and early-career researchers just starting out with research software and investigating future careers.

As the birthplace of the RSE community, the UK conference has become the de facto international conference for RSE. It attracts significant numbers of attendees from international RSE communities.

In order to encourage delegates to engage with sponsors at the event we will again have a sponsorship passport. This will reward delegates who interact with all of the sponsors.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Please note that the number of packages in each category is still subject to change. We also offer the possibility for sponsors to negotiate reasonable changes to the packages (e.g., switching out benefits etc.).

Add-Ons

A limited number of TVs are available. These can be hired for £500 to have at the sponsorship stand for the duration of the conference.

Participation and Inclusion Add-On

Each sponsorship package comes with the option to add:

• a UK travel bursary of five hundred GBP (£500),
• an international travel bursary of one thousand GBP (£1,000).

These allow participants who would otherwise not be able to travel to RSECon26 to participate in the conference in-person.

Alternatively, sponsors can donate VAT-free to the Participation and Inclusion fund.

Sponsors of the travel bursaries will be listed on the conference website and will be thanked separately for this in an additional social media post.

Disclaimer

Please see our sponsorship policy.

Changes to the sponsorship packages can be negotiated within reason on a per-sponsor basis, as long as the overall cost-benefit ratio roughly remains the same. For example, costs can be reduced with benefits being cut, benefits can be added for additional money, or elements can be exchanged.

We reserve the right to change the number of sponsorship packages in each category.

Where a programme contribution is offered as a sponsorship benefit (e.g. a parallel talk), this has to adhere to the conference guidelines given to all conference presenters, and be relevant to the community.

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Full Package Comparison

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