Registration is now open for the fifth RCD Nexus Day!
RCD Nexus Day is an official PEARC co-located event with no additional cost to attend. Attendees must be registered for PEARC26 and wearing their conference badge. The event will be held at the main conference venue, the Minneapolis Convention Center.
A limited amount of travel support will be available for attendees who could not otherwise attend the PEARC25 conference. Register by May 8, 2026 to be considered for travel support. Please note that requesting support does not guarantee it will be awarded. Notification of travel support will be given by May 15. Attending and fully participating in the entire RCD Nexus Day workshop is required in order to receive travel support.
Attendees will select one of two specialized tracks:
Building Onramps: Developing a Guide to Facilitate Entry into the RCD Profession
Research computing and data (RCD) professionals are essential to the research enterprise, yet there is no single, accessible resource that helps students, early-career professionals, or career-changers understand what this field is, what skills it values, or how to break into it. For those not already connected to the community, the path into RCD work remains largely invisible — discovered by accident rather than by design.
This working session will bring together RCD hiring managers, mentors, practitioners, and early-career professionals to collaboratively develop an outline for a practical guide that will be fully drafted and published on the CaRCC website following the workshop. The guide will address key questions facing anyone considering an RCD career: What does this work actually look like? What technical and interpersonal skills should I be developing? Where do I find internships, fellowships, and entry-level positions? How do I build connections in this community? The session will also examine whether current demand for RCD professionals still outpaces supply — and what that means for how we recruit and develop the next generation of talent. Whether you’re a hiring manager struggling to find qualified candidates, a mentor looking for better resources to share, or a student or early professional exploring this career path, your perspective is needed to make this guide genuinely useful.
Next-Generation RCD Capabilities Assessment: A Community-informed Refresh of the CaRCC Capabilities Model
This interactive workshop will introduce participants to a refreshed full set of assessment questions, informed by input gathered during and since last year’s Nexus Day workshop. Per specific input from the community, implemented changes have been made to clarify, streamline, and update the content of questions, reducing the number of questions in both the full set and in the ‘Essentials’ subset. Changes also reflect requests for enhanced coverage of emerging capabilities (e.g. AI, quantum, education use cases, cybersecurity) and to further generalize across the full range of institutional categories, sizes, and resource levels.
By leveraging input from participants across a wide range of RCD roles and experience-levels, we will:
- Review the refreshed Capabilities Model question set, to familiarize attendees with the reasonings and examples of changes made.
- Provide attendees with time to explore and try out the new question set.
- Gather attendee feedback within each RCD ‘facing’, and within the set of Essential questions.
- Engage attendees in holistic feedback across the Model, further informing any final refinement of the new version.
Attendees who are experienced or new to the Capabilities Model are welcome to join; the workshop will support anyone to get started with their own campus assessment. The workshop will especially benefit from participation by RCD professionals and stakeholders from smaller, teaching-focused, other resource-constrained institutions, and non-academic organizations. Following the workshop, we expect to make remaining adjustments to the new question set before instantiating and advertising it as the new default.
Register now!