The annual BioFAIR Fellowship launched on 1 October 2025 with 10 inaugural Fellows. Bringing together a diverse cohort from academia and the wider UK life sciences ecosystem, the Fellowship equips its members with the training, networks, and resources to drive sustainable cultural change around data.
See below for full bios of the Fellows:
Robert Andrews
I am a lecturer in Bioinformatics at the School of Medicine at Cardiff University. My interests focus on next-generation sequencing (NGS) omics, with particular emphasis on the development of reproducible workflow and FAIR data stewardship.
Recently I have co-led the establishment and coordination of a national Research Data Management (RDM) Club as part of ELIXIR-UK, the national node of ELIXIR: a pan-European infrastructure for life science data. ELIXIR and the UK node have brought together a diverse and distributed community of professionals across job roles and institutions, united by a shared mission to build FAIR digital research infrastructure.
At a local level in Wales I work with Bioinformaticians in the Wales Bioinformatics Network supported by the Wales Cancer Research Centre and Supercomputing Wales. I also work with GW4, an alliance of the Universities of Cardiff, Bristol, Exeter and Bath as part of the their communities of practice generator and the GW4 Isambard 3 supercomputer.
Through collaborative engagement within Wales, GW4 and ELIXIR-UK, I was introduced to BioFAIR and how it aligns with my interests in FAIR workflow and data stewardship.
Jean-Marie Burel
Jean-Marie received his PhD in Mathematics (differential geometry). After a post-doc at Lund University (Sweden), he moved to the University of Dundee in 2003 to join Prof Jason Swedlow to start the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) [https://www.openmicroscopy.org/]. He has since worked on data management solutions (OMERO) for bioimaging data, worked on the creation of file formats specifications (OME Data Model, OME-TIFF and now the OME-NGFF). He works on developing analytical workflows around OME-Zarr, an imaging format implementing the OME-NGFF specification, that supports multi-dimensional, multi-resolution data in cloud-based storage systems, enabling a whole new level of scalability for bioimaging data.
He is also a passionate educator. He has designed, developed, and delivered training courses and workshops. He has taught worldwide on topics like FAIR data, image data management or image analysis to hundreds of researchers, at every level of experience.
Nan Fletcher-Lloyd
I am an early career researcher specialising in biomedical data science, and I currently work at Imperial College London and as a member of the UK Dementia Research Institute Care Research and Technology Centre. My research focuses on improving methods for biomedical research from biological discovery to clinical monitoring by contributing novel representation learning approaches for clinical applications in ageing and dementia, developing workflows to support reproducible and open science. Through this interdisciplinary work, I have come to appreciate the critical role of data stewardship, not only in advancing research, but also in ensuring transparency, equitability, and utility of data-driven tools in real-world healthcare settings. I am passionate about science communication, and I regularly take part in public engagement and outreach activities. Furthermore, I am dedicated to fostering diversity and inclusion within research culture, and I actively work to support more equitable participation in science.
Sam Haynes
I am a Senior Bioinformatician at the Quadram Institute. My role consists of bridging the gap between biological research and computing infrastructure to facilitate world leading research into food, disease and the gut microbiome. I manage several research software stacks: Galaxy, OMERO, and IRIDA, to help researchers analyse their data and continue to develop Cloud-based and HPC-based infrastructure for biological research.
Prior to my current role, I completed a bioinformatics PhD studying fungal transcriptomics at the University of Edinburgh and then worked at EPCC – the UK’s leading centre of Supercomputing and Data Science expertise. I have been exposed to data of differing types and quality leading me to believe FAIR data principles – although daunting to achieve – allow the scientific community to maximally utilise the data we have worked so hard to create.
Marisa Loach
Marisa is a PhD student at The Open University, where she is reanalysing public single cell data to explore how our cells change in heart disease and cancer. Beyond these biological questions, she enables life scientists to make the most of public data by creating FAIR workflows, tutorials, and guidance on selecting a workflow manager. Marisa previously worked as a freelance writer after completing a degree in biological sciences, but she returned to academia after learning to code online and becoming interested in bioinformatics. She is now an active contributor to the Galaxy platform as she supports their goal of making bioinformatics accessible for everyone. She chairs the Galaxy Community Board and represents the needs of users on the Galaxy Executive Board.
Priyanka Surana
I am a Senior Scientific Manager at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where my work brings together data, technology, and community. While I began my career in bioinformatics research, I became most inspired by the systems and collaborations that make discovery possible — from workflows and standards to the people who sustain them.
At Sanger, I contribute to major collaborative initiatives that generate and analyse complex biological data. My current focus is on designing and developing Nextflow pipelines to make functional genomics data reproducible, reusable, and scalable. Beyond technical work, I connect bioinformaticians, software engineers, and AI researchers across the campus, fostering collaboration and collective problem-solving.
I believe science advances fastest when data, methods, and workflows are open and reusable. As a BioFAIR Fellow, I aim to help embed FAIR principles and collaborative practices into everyday research, ensuring science remains trustworthy, reusable, and ready for the challenges of tomorrow.
Nicola Soranzo
Nicola Soranzo is a senior member of the Data Science team at the Earlham Institute, where he leads CyVerse UK, a cloud e-infrastructure platform that supports bioinformatics services, research applications, and advanced training for the UK bioscience community. Since 2013, he has also been a core developer of Galaxy, an open-source platform for accessible, reproducible, and transparent data analysis in the life sciences. In this role, he co-maintains its backend code and testing infrastructure and contributes to Galaxy tools, workflows, and training materials, as well as to widely used libraries and utilities such as BioBlend and Planemo.
He is co-author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal papers and regularly delivers training, ranging from Carpentries workshops on coding and data science to Galaxy courses on data analysis, tool development, API use, and server administration. As co-lead of the Galaxy Community in ELIXIR – the European intergovernmental organisation that coordinates life science resources to support research and innovation – and ELIXIR-UK Technical Coordinator, he plays an active role in coordinating initiatives, fostering open science, and supporting community-driven infrastructure.
His research interests include enabling sustainable, FAIR-aligned workflows and training resources that lower barriers for bioscience researchers. Through the BioFAIR Fellowship, he aims to engage and coordinate the UK community of Galaxy users, workflow developers, trainers, and service providers, and to help researchers FAIRify and disseminate their workflows via registries such as WorkflowHub and the Galaxy IWC.
Evan Troendle
I am a computational biologist who builds tools to study and model complex living systems. Drawing on training in physics, materials science, chemistry, and computer science, I create data-analysis workflows used in many areas of biology. My work has included computer simulations of how molecules move, creating 3D maps of tiny blood vessels from microscope images, studying gene activity in single cells across species, tracing viral evolution and spread over time and across locations, and modelling how medicines travel through tissues. These projects have shown me how essential it is to make research methods transparent and easy for others to reuse.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in David Simpson’s group at the Wellcome-Wolfson Institute for Experimental Medicine, Queen’s University Belfast, where I apply these approaches to public-health genomics. I developed analysis pipelines that helped health agencies track COVID-19, mapping how SARS-CoV-2 entered and spread across Ireland and monitoring infections through both patient samples and wastewater testing. The results contributed thousands of sequences to international databases and a FAIR pipeline for comparing wastewater and individual sequencing data. I also mentor undergraduate and postgraduate students in FAIR and reproducible research practices, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in genomics, helping the next generation of life-science researchers work in open, shareable, and comparable ways.
Craig Willis
I have a research background in bioinformatic applications across health and disease. Currently, I work at the University of Exeter as a Senior Research Data scientist, where I lead a centralised team of Research Data Scientists and Data Stewards. As part of this role, I also serve as Senior Data Lead for the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative. My involvement with the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative has highlighted to me that there remains an ongoing need to define, drive and facilitate FAIR-aligned data standards and analysis protocols within the UK’s functional genomics space.
Chris Wyatt
Chris is a computational biologist at University College London with a background in evolutionary biology and genomics. His current work focuses on developing easy-to-use, reproducible workflows in Nextflow that empower agri-ecologists and evolutionary biologists to carry out large-scale omics analyses without steep technical barriers. He has contributed to community-driven infrastructure projects such as nf-core, helping to ensure that high-quality bioinformatics pipelines are accessible and sustainable for the long term.
Chris’s career reflects a shift from studying the biology of organisms to building the computational tools that make modern biological discovery possible. Alongside his research, he organises hackathons, teaches on bioinformatics methods, and publishes his work in leading scientific journals. These activities reflect his broader commitment to supporting the research community, not only through software but also by fostering collaboration, skills sharing, and capacity building. He is also a strong advocate for open-source collaboration, FAIR data practices, and sustainable research software.
