Advancing Biomedical Data Science Careers: Stakeholder map (draft)

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). It began in February 2025 and is set to conclude in January 2027. 

To achieve its aim of documenting skills, roles, and team science approaches that foster the recognition and advancement of data science careers in biomedical research, the project is structured into three work packages: 

• Mapping skills and competency frameworks to identify gaps.
• Documenting case studies at organisational, team, and individual levels to understand roles, career pathways, and team science approaches.
• Evaluating and recommending innovative approaches and ways of working to strengthen capacity building and improve quality and standards in biomedical data science.

As part of Work Package 1 – Mapping skills and competency frameworks, we have begun a landscape mapping exercise to better understand the biomedical data science ecosystem. This phase focuses first on mapping stakeholders, followed by a detailed review of available  and relevant competency frameworks. From there, we will conduct a high-level competency analysis to highlight areas requiring further development, which will then be linked to training offerings. 

The work presented here is the first draft of the UK biomedical data science stakeholder map, one of the outputs under Work Package 1. Work on this draft map, developed in Miro, began in April 2025 and continued through October 2025. 
We will keep updating our map every six months until the end of the project in January 2027.

The map can be viewed on Miro at this link: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJodRnBI=/?share_link_id=356683406202

Rationale 

To guide our work, we adopted a broad definition of biomedical research, following the Medical Research Council: ranging from omics to microscopy to medical imaging to population cohort to environmental data.

The draft map captures a wide range of stakeholders, including organisations, projects, and teams, as well as the different domains of biomedical data science they represent. Our focus is on the UK ecosystem, with international players included only when their work directly relates to the UK.

It is important to note that while this map is intended to help organisations and individuals understand the UK biomedical data science landscape, it is not exhaustive, particularly at this first-draft stage.

The PDF contains an image of the map and a description for each category we’ve mapped. It also outlines engagement activities carried out so far to gather input from the community, and the next steps.

Once finalised, the map will be published and made openly available on Kumu in a more interactive format to disseminate our work and benefit the broader community. As this is an ongoing piece of work, we welcome feedback, comments and suggestions for improvement. If you’d like to contribute to this work, please email your comments to: abdc@turing.ac.uk.