Data Coordination Centre

The Data Coordination Centre (DCC) aims to accelerate scientific breakthroughs in human functional genomics by enabling scientists to find, use, and share data generated by the Initiative. We are a centralised team based at the University of Exeter to support researchers funded by the UK Human Functional Genomics Initiative (FGx). 

The DCC will work to: 

• Support data standardisation and analysis – Hands-on support will be offered as well as signposting to specialists in other areas of the Initiative 
• Enable the adoption of FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) – FAIR improves transparency in research, allowing data to be accurately analysed and reducing biases 
• Ensure the legacy of data produced by the Initiative – A catalogue of highly annotated datasets will be created to allow others to re-use data whenever possible 

Who are we

The DCC is a small, cross-disciplinary team made up of bioinformaticians, software engineers, and data specialists.  

The team will collaborate with academics and national partners including EMBL-EBI and BioFAIR. 

• Craig: Provides high level oversight, leadership and management of the staff and activity in the Data Coordination Centre. Has broad experience across bioinformatics and data science in research and education. 

• Dorothea: Bioinformatics PhD with a focus on developing tools to aid data reproducibility, worked as a data scientist, data engineer and now data steward. Champions FAIR data practice. Offers support with data cleaning, federation, and curation to enable FAIR data storage. 

• Rachael: Offers support with bioinformatics analysis (currently specialising in RNAseq data), standardising pipelines, and presenting computational work to experimental scientists 

• Sam: Offers support with software development, coding best practices (reproducibility, testing, version control), workflow automation, and communicating technical solutions to non-computational researchers. 

What we can assist with

We offer hands-on technical support across data stewardship, bioinformatics, and software engineering, including but not limited to: 

• Facilitate knowledge sharing across the Initiative 

• Provide training to upload protocols to protocols.io

• Advise on metadata standards to ensure data reusability 

• Centralise pipelines and workflows to allow code reuse 

• Aid with annotation, standardisation, and reproducibility of workflows for upload to GitHub and WorkflowHub

• Assist in data curation and signpost appropriate data repositories 

• Develop custom scripts and cli tools to automate repetitive bioinformatics tasks and data processing steps 

• Implement version control, testing, documentation and containerisation best practices 

• Set up continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines to automate testing and deployment of research software (HPC or cloud based environments) 

If you would like to know more about how we can help with your FGx-funded project, email the DCC at [email protected]