Friday 21 August, 2026
BioFAIR has appointed Galabina Yordanova as its Lead Product Owner and the newest member of the growing BioFAIR Hub at the Earlham Institute in Norwich. Gabby joins from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), where she worked on a variety of data resources delivering intuitive, user-centred digital services for the life-sciences community. Her work includes participation in landmark projects such as AlphaFold DB and the Human Cell Atlas.
The Lead Product Owner role puts the needs of the UK life science research community at the heart of BioFAIR’s mission: delivering a step-change in how UK life sciences data is managed, accessed, and shared, by turning today’s fragmented landscape of services, tools, and resources into a cohesive national research infrastructure. As Lead Product Owner, Gabby becomes the primary advocate for researchers and research technical professionals across the UK life sciences community, with responsibility for the product vision that ensures the BioFAIR Technical Platform is intuitive, coherent, and aligned with real-world research data journeys, enabling researchers to move seamlessly from “assay to insight”.
Working in close partnership with Lead Architect Laura Shemilt and Senior Technical Project Manager Nishadi De Silva at the BioFAIR Hub, she will provide product leadership across BioFAIR’s five spokes – the Data, Methods and People Commons, the Knowledge Hub, and the Portal. Gabby will support and mentor these teams to define their own value streams, while ensuring the services they deliver come together into a single, seamless experience for researchers.
Gabby brings a strong combination of skills to the role: significant experience in product ownership, user-centred design, and an understanding of the motivations and pain points of researchers working with complex data at scale. She has experience leading collaborative, cross-functional teams to drive big science initiatives forward, and brings a strong socio-technical awareness of how team structures, communication patterns, and service boundaries directly shape a product’s success.
Tony Burdett, BioFAIR Director, said: “Gabby’s appointment is a key addition to the leadership team at the BioFAIR Hub, and it matters enormously that this role is a product role. Success for BioFAIR means delivering an intuitive infrastructure that researchers use because it makes it genuinely easier for them to conduct research. To achieve this, someone has to carefully channel research needs with authority, ensuring they are considered in our decision making. Gabby brings precisely the user empathy, product judgement, and collaborative approach we need.”
Galabina Yordanova said: “I am delighted to be joining BioFAIR at this stage of the programme. Researchers in the UK life sciences are working with data of extraordinary complexity, and too often the services around them do not quite join up. Gaps in this connectivity cost researchers time and attention that is better directed to their science. My priority is to make sure BioFAIR is designed around real research needs rather than around our own organisational boundaries. This means getting out into the community, understanding at an early stage where people get stuck and the workarounds they have traditionally used. I’m really looking forward to this exciting challenge.
Gabby’s appointment comes as BioFAIR moves firmly into its delivery phase. The first cohort of BioFAIR Fellows has been active across the UK since October 2025; with the first Pathfinder Projects having launched in May 2026; the Methods Commons, BioFAIR’s first delivery spoke, is now underway; and preparations are advancing for the selection of the next spoke, the Knowledge Hub. With its Lead Architect, Senior Technical Project Manager, and now Lead Product Owner all in post, the BioFAIR Hub is well positioned to build the national infrastructure it was funded to create.