Zulip chatroom (join #December-2025 channel)

HackMD notepad (for collaborative note-taking)

Wifi: eduroam or Visitor

Additional packaging slides

15-17 December 2025, Portland OR

Welcome to the repository for the 2025 URSSI Winter School! All instruction will happen in the Oregon State University Portland Center, room 2029.

OSU Portland Center is located in the Meier & Frank Building, which is access controlled. Please show the guest pass at the entrance to the security guard (via the camera) to enter.

Each morning and afternoon session will be split up with a break, and we'll have lunch organized on-site on all days.

We have adopted a code of conduct for the URSSI Winter School and all associated spaces, both physical and digital. Please review this.

Also, the URSSI Winter School is a scent-free environment. We would like to ask the participants to refrain from using any scented lotions, perfumes, essential oils, scented antiperspirants, etc., as these make the space inaccessible for folks with asthma, allergies to the scents, or with Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. Having a scent-free environment will help prevent dizziness, nausea, breathing difficulties, headaches, and other issues among our participants.

Kyle Niemeyer is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering. He leads a research group that uses computation to investigate problems involving reacting-fluid flows (particularly combustion and fire) and particle transport, and with a focus on how to efficiently use modern high-performance computing systems. He's also an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS).

Madicken Munk is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nuclear Science and Engineering at Oregon State University. Previously, she was a postdoc at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications where she was a maintainer and release manager of yt, a visualization package for simulation data.

Joanna Piper Morgan is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Nuclear Criticality Safety Division at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University, working on techniques for modeling time-dependent neutron transport using Monte Carlo methods, and specifically strategies for doing this on high-performance/heterogeneous computing systems enabled by Python.

You will need a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that you have administrative privileges on, and need some specific software packages installed:

• the Bash shell; you should only have to set this up if you are using a Windows machine, following the Software Carpentry setup instructions
• Git
• Python 3.x; we recommend installing miniforge for simplicity and install packages to environments as needed
• a text editor, preferably one designed for writing code; we recommend VS Code or Sublime Text

You should also sign up for a GitHub account if you don't already have one.

Specific Python packages (install with pip or conda):

• pytest
• sphinx

You will have open work time to spend on an individual project where you develop a Python-based research software package. Please bring an idea or some basis for a project.

Ideally, this should be something that supports your work and that you would (or could) continue developing or using after the winter school. We hope that most—or at least some—of the projects will eventually be submitted to the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), which we'll briefly talk about on the final day.

Please follow the instructions you will receive over email and reach out to Kyle Niemeyer with any questions or concerns.

TBD