Advancing Biomedical Data Science Careers

Documenting skills, roles and team science approaches to foster the recognition and advancement of data science careers in biomedical research

Introduction

The Advancing Biomedical Data Science Careers (ABDC) project is a collaboration between two world leaders in biomedical data science - The Alan Turing Institute and EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). From our extensive experience in this area, and working with a diverse range of existing and new partners, our project outputs will enable organisations to incorporate data science skills into their teams and establish greater understanding of the common language needed for skills and careers in this domain. 
 

                                           

 

                  The Alan Turing Institute logo

                                                                                 

EMBL EBI logo

        

Explaining the science

Data and data science are transforming the world and data science expertise is in extremely high demand. As set out in the recent MRC strategic review (2022), there is an urgent need in biomedical research for a shared framework of data science careers, to enable skills mobility and recognition of biomedical data science roles and team approaches across different contexts.

For this project, we are using a broad definition of biomedical research defined by the Medical Research Council as ‘ranging from omics to microscopy to medical imaging to population cohort to environmental data’. We will focus on a people centered approach in terms of roles that are included in this space.

Through engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, such as Universities, Research Institutes, Government Departments, Healthcare Providers, and Health-Related Industrial Organisations in biomedical data science and beyond, this project will empower cross-domain working so that collaborative team science approaches lead the future of biomedical research. We have international as well as UK partners to enable leveraging our global networks to keep the UK at the cutting edge of this research.
 

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. 

 

Call for biomedical data science community members for advisory board

It is our commitment in this project to embed and champion equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) by ensuring we conduct our project in a manner that enables diverse and inclusive input from the biomedical data science community and beyond. This will lead to more impactful outputs that will provide transparency of roles, career paths and ways of working. It  will allow for democratisation of knowledge in terms of careers in biomedical data science and will create opportunities for a greater variety of people, skills and roles in teams leading to truly diverse teams.

To put this commitment into action, we are putting out a call for members of this community to join our advisory board. There will be up to two advisory board places for community members. We are particularly looking for early career researchers, those from under-represented groups and those performing unique roles in this space.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please fill in this contact form:  https://forms.office.com/e/cRJaXSbX8Z
 

Organisers

Dr Emma Karoune

Principal Researcher - Research Community Building | Tools, Practices and Systems

Harry Meacher

Programme Manager – Environment & Sustainability Grand Challenge

Contact info

For more information about this project, please email us at [email protected]

Funders