  The incubator and research projects sponsored by the Center for Research in
Open Source Software (CROSS, cross.ucsc.edu) at UC Santa Cruz have been very
effective at promoting the professional and technical development of research
software engineers. Carlos Maltzahn founded CROSS in 2015 with a generous gift
of $2,000,000 from UC Santa Cruz alumnus Dr. Sage Weil and founding memberships
of Toshiba America Electronic Components, SK Hynix Memory Solutions, and Micron
Technology. Over the past five years, CROSS funding has enabled PhD students to
not only create research software projects but also learn how to draw in new
contributors and leverage established open source software communities. This
position paper will present CROSS fellowships as case studies for how
university-led open source projects can create a real-world, reproducible model
for effectively training, funding and supporting research software engineers.
