BioFAIR has appointed Laura Shemilt as its Lead Architect, joining the BioFAIR Hub at the Earlham Institute in Norwich from June 2026. Laura moves to BioFAIR from the Rosalind Franklin Institute, where she has been Deputy Challenge Lead and Head of Research Software Engineering.
The Lead Architect role is central to 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 Architect, Laura will hold technical responsibility for the design of BioFAIR’s federated digital research infrastructure — a hub-and-spokes architecture that will connect data, methods, training, and tools for the UK life sciences. She will lead architectural decision-making across the BioFAIR Hub and its emerging network of spokes, work directly with technology providers across the UK research community, and engage closely with delivery partners, the BioFAIR Fellows, Pathfinder Projects, and the wider UK research technical professional community.
Laura brings an impressive array of skill sets to the role: deep systems and solution architecture experience in research and data-intensive environments, a strong track record of delivering sustainable, interoperable services at scale, and the collaborative instincts needed to make a federated infrastructure work in practice. She studied Physics at Imperial College London before completing a PhD in X-ray imaging at UCL, and has worked across both academia and industry in data science and engineering roles. At the Rosalind Franklin Institute, she built and led the institute’s research software engineering function and helped shape its Advanced Research Computing platform, turning the Franklin’s diverse experimental data into curated, analysable resources for its researchers and partners.
Tony Burdett, BioFAIR Director, said: “Laura’s appointment is a major step forward for BioFAIR. We’re building a national-scale infrastructure that has to work for thousands of researchers across very different domains, on top of a federation of institutional and community platforms, and it is a serious architectural challenge. Laura brings exactly the right mix of hands-on technical knowledge, deep knowledge of research software engineering practices, experience of operating research infrastructure at scale, and the collaborative instincts we need to make a hub-and-spokes model genuinely work.”
Laura Shemilt said: “I am very excited to be joining BioFAIR as Lead Architect as I believe that well designed and implemented digital research infrastructure is fundamental for high-quality, impactful research. The biosciences provide a unique data challenge which provides an interesting and motivating environment to work. I hope to accelerate research in UK Bioscience and deliver functional platforms at the national level to enable scientists to remain cutting-edge.”
Laura’s appointment comes at a pivotal moment for BioFAIR. The first cohort of BioFAIR Fellows is now active across the UK, having launched in October 2025; the first Pathfinder Projects kicked off in May 2026; and BioFAIR’s first delivery spoke, the Methods Commons, has just been appointed. With its Lead Architect now in place, BioFAIR is well positioned to move from planning into delivery of the national infrastructure it was funded to create.