PeerLadder leads, Saskia Lawson-Tovey and Xenia Perez Sitja, travelled to Manchester for the PSDI & Royce Materials Data Summit, held on 29–31 July 2026 and jointly hosted by the Physical Sciences Data Infrastructure (PSDI) and the Henry Royce Institute. They were there to present a PeerLadder poster – and to take the programme somewhere new: deeper into the physical sciences and engineering.
PeerLadder already counts Research Software Engineers and technical professionals from many backgrounds among its community – but the reach so far has skewed towards the life sciences. A summit dedicated to digitalisation in materials science was a chance to grow further into the physical sciences and engineering, fields with a real and pressing need for better support for underrepresented groups, and to see how the peer-mentoring model resonates with the experimentalists, computational scientists, data engineers and software engineers working across materials research.
The answer was encouraging. The poster drew a steady stream of visitors throughout the summit, and the conversations reached well beyond the usual circles. We spoke not only with UK-based attendees but with colleagues from across Europe, spanning both academia and industry – all recognising the same gap in leadership and career development for digital Research Technical Professionals, whatever their discipline, and interested in supporting a similar programme in their fields as mentors, supporters or ambassadors.
Among those familiar challenges came a familiar face. We were delighted to bump into another PeerLadder mentee, Sarah Jaffa, on her home turf at the University of Manchester – and it was a joy to catch up on her experience of the programme and hear how the ideas behind PeerLadder are travelling into her own community.
Reaching diverse disciplines, meeting mentees where they are, and finding the same appetite for peer-mentoring across borders and sectors – these are exactly the connections that show how far the PeerLadder format can and is travelling.
