Join our fourth edition of a yearly meeting of research IT specialists, organized by the EnhanceR association!
Event Format
An in-person event for members of the Swiss research IT and research software engineer community, this symposium provides a platform for professionals to meet, network, and exchange knowledge.
Dive deep into the trends of the field, collaborate on shared challenges, and present your innovative projects in engaging show-and-tell sessions or host a workshop.
Take the opportunity to share both success and failure stories, learn from your colleagues, and collaborate on advancement of Research Software Engineering in Swiss academia.
Focus Areas
-
Swiss RSE in action
- Best practices for reproducible, ethical, inclusive, and collaborative data science and research
- Effective data management strategies and techniques
- Generative AI in RSE
- The role and challenges of an RSE
- Scaling up RSE initiatives within Switzerland
- Project management for research software projects
Date and Venue
EnhanceR Symposium is a full-day event on Sep 4th, 2025. The event will hosted at the HEG-FR in Fribourg.
Address:
School of Management Fribourg
Chemin du Musée 4
1700 Fribourg
How to participate
The registration for the event is now open!
If you wish to contribute to the event with organizing a workshop or presenting a show-and-tell session, please submit your idea by July 11th, 2025.
The event is open to all research IT specialists and research software engineers in Switzerland, whether your organization is part of the EnhanceR network or not. Participation is free of charge, but registration is mandatory. Lunch and coffee breaks for participants are sponsored by EnhanceR.
You can also add the event to your calendar.
Target audience
The event's goal is to connect research IT specialists: experts who empower research by providing specific, advanced IT services.
Examples include research software engineers, high-performance and scientific computing experts, data and information scientists, as well as research data management experts, data stewards and data analysis specialists in Swiss higher education institutions, Swiss research institutions and private companies that have a focus on serving public academic institutions (e.g. SWITCH).
Keynote speakers
Dr. Sylvain Corlay is the founder and CEO of QuantStack, a company specialising in open-source software for scientific computing.
As an open-source developer, Sylvain is very active in the scientific computing ecosystem, particularly in the Jupyter project, as well as in the conda-forge and xtensor projects. In 2018, he and the other members of the Jupyter leadership were honoured with the ACM Software System Award.
Beyond QuantStack, Sylvain is very involved in the community. He was a board member of the NumFOCUS foundation from 2018 to 2024, organised the JupyterCon 2023 conference in Paris, and has been coordinating the PyData community in Paris since 2017, as organiser of the PyData meetup group and conference in 2024 and 2025.
Dr. Imanol Schlag is a Research Scientist at the ETH AI Center and co-leads the LLM effort of the Swiss AI Initiative. In this role, he oversees the development of transparent, multilingual large language models utilizing Switzerland's Alps supercomputer with over 10,000 NVIDIA Grace Hopper GPUs. His team of engineers and researchers focuses on creating open-source models with strong multilingual capabilities, legal compliance with Swiss and EU regulations, and transparent training practices using public data. The project aims to prevent dependency on international technology companies while enabling Swiss institutions to benefit from sovereign AI technology.
With a PhD in AI from USI (2023) on neural architectures and previous research stays at Meta AI, Google Research, and Microsoft Research, he brings deep technical expertise to building responsible AI systems that meet Switzerland's high standards for transparency and trustworthiness.
Organizers
The EnhanceR association is a nationally and internationally recognized network for Swiss research IT expertise. As of 2025, it counts 11 Swiss higher education, infrastructure and research institutions as members. Its motto is "Enhancing research through IT expertise."
The mission of EnhanceR is to facilitate research excellence in Switzerland by bringing together Research IT specialist groups from Swiss academic institutions and by organising events such as the annual symposium or virtual seminars. The association also aims to support and cooperate with other communities involved in supporting Swiss research through technical skills and knowledge, such as Research Software Engineers (RSE) or Data Stewards.
For questions regarding EnhanceR or the event, reach out to us at symposium@enhancer.ch
The organizers thank the Direction des Services IT of the University of Fribourg for co-organizing the event.
Previous Events
Looking for previous EnhanceR Symposium materials? Visit the 2022, 2023 or 2024 edition website.