A short story of the BioinfoCoreLeaders Club
Since 2022, several leaders of bioinformatics core facilities have been meeting in an informal capacity, in May 2026, they worked to expand reach and formally met at the University of Liverpool to compare notes on a set of problems none of them had managed to solve alone. 17 organisations sent someone. Most arrived quietly assuming their own situation was unusual.
It was not. A bioinformatics core facility sits in an awkward institutional position: funded like a service, judged like a research group, and staffed by people whose job titles change every time HR reorganises. Demand outstrips capacity everywhere. Costing models are invented locally, defended locally and almost never compared. Recruitment competes with industry salaries on an academic budget. And the people carrying all of this – heads, directors, managers, principal dRTPs, depending which university you ask – had nowhere to ask one another whether any of it was normal.
On 6 May 2026, seventeen organisations sent someone to Liverpool to talk about problems they had each assumed were local.
What happened at Liverpool
We opened with flash talks. Every facility lead had a few minutes to set out their team structure, what they work on, how they are funded and the one problem they most wanted the room’s help with. It is a plain format and it did the most useful thing of the two days: it made the overlap impossible to miss. Cost recovery models invented in isolation and defended in isolation. Demand permanently ahead of capacity. Procurement. Recruitment against industry salaries on an academic budget. Career structures that mostly do not exist – of the organisations in the room, three have a formal career pathway for Research Technical Professionals. Three.
By the end of the first morning the question had stopped being whether a national community was needed and became “what to call it”.
The programme changed on day two
The second day was meant to run to a plan but after an engaging, hands-on session on FAIR, facilitated by Sam Haynes, we rewrote it.
That session had surfaced something uncomfortable. Asked what proportion of their analyses eventually become public, almost nobody could say, because facilities rarely hear back from users once the work leaves. The barriers were familiar – time, money, no incentives, journal and funder requirements that vary, no governance – but the deeper issue was structural. Users own the data. Facilities hold, process and organise it, and quietly keep backups that users depend on and storage budgets increasingly cannot support. Very few institutions have anyone whose actual job is data stewardship inside a service setting.
The other thread was AI, and it was more urgent than expected. Facilities described agentic tools, AI-assisted coding, researchers routing around training entirely, governance arriving after the fact, and development moving faster than any validation cycle a core facility can run. Several described cases where a user’s misuse of generative AI had created real research integrity problems. The argument that came out of it was not that bioinformatics expertise should be defended against AI, but that it is being misread as downstream technical support at precisely the moment when it is load-bearing for whether results are correct.
So the day-two discussions became four priority areas for the community, with people volunteering to take them on:
- FAIR practice: Robert Andrews, Sam Haynes and Nicholas Owen
- Advocacy: Lauren Mee and Eva Caamaño Gutiérrez
- Peer-community support: Leo Zeef and Matthieu Miossec
- Promotion of the network: Sascha Ott.
Who was in the room
Babraham Institute · BioFAIR · CRUK Cambridge Institute · CRUK Manchester Institute · Earlham Institute / ELIXIR-UK · Francis Crick Institute · King’s College London · MRC Toxicology Unit, University of Cambridge · University College London · University of Cambridge · University of Leeds · University of Liverpool · University of Manchester · University of Oxford · University of Southampton · University of Warwick · University of York
Newcastle University and the University of Exeter were supportive but could not attend. Birmingham and Glasgow have joined since. The list is still shorter and more concentrated than it should be, and widening it is the first thing on the agenda for September.
One number worth stating plainly
Fewer than a quarter of data professionals are women. Of the 17 core facilities represented at Liverpool, three had a woman in the leadership post. That is not a problem the network created and it is not one a network can fix on its own, but a community that intends to argue about career pathways should be willing to say it out loud.
What happens next
The second meeting is at the University of Warwick on 10 – 11 September 2026, hosted by Sascha Ott. It is funded through the ELIXIR-UK Flexible Bursaries Scheme activity BioinfoCore Connect UK, with support from 10x Genomics, Inflexa and Kidney Research UK.
A grant from DisCouRSE means junior staff can attend and that career development is on the programme – which is not incidental, given that three of us have a career pathway to develop anyone into.
