Advancing Biomedical Data Science Careers

Project aims

To fulfil our aim of creating a better understanding of skills, roles and team science approaches in biomedical data science, our project has three key objectives:
 

• To evaluate skills gaps and identify priority areas for developing knowledge, skills and behaviours across the biomedical data science ecosystem.
   
• To better understand roles, career pathways and team science approaches within the biomedical data science community and how these can improve access, resourcing and career offers. 
   
• To evaluate and recommend innovative approaches and ways of working that will  drive forward capacity building and improve quality and standards in biomedical data science. 

Advisory Board

We are committed to embedding and championing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in this project by ensuring it is conducted in a way that enables diverse and inclusive input from the biomedical data science community and beyond. This approach will lead to more impactful outputs, offering greater transparency around roles, career paths, and ways of working. It will also support the democratisation of knowledge related to careers in biomedical data science and create opportunities for a wider variety of people, skills, and roles—ultimately contributing to truly diverse teams.

To put this commitment into practice, we established an Advisory Board composed of a diverse range of data professionals with a biomedical focus and launched an open call for members of the biomedical data science community to join, ensuring diversity across career stages and data science or research roles. 
 

Call for Case Studies

We are documenting how diverse data science roles and teams have been successfully implemented in biomedical research across different types and scales of organisations. We would like to hear from a wide range of experiences, to highlight existing challenges and opportunities, gaps and incentives. In particular, we are focusing on three levels: 

1. how these roles and teams are established and implemented at the organisational level, to better understand resourcing and advocacy for new roles;
    
2. how collaborative team science has been successfully approached and managed within teams;
    
3. career pathway examples at the individual level, to highlight a diverse set of role models who have successfully navigated this space.
    

If you would like to contribute a case study, please let us know by emailing [email protected]