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September 1, 2025 · Chris Wyatt

Joining BioFAIR as a Fellow

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BioFAIR

I’m delighted to share that I will be a BioFAIR Fellow this year.

BioFAIR is a UK initiative working towards a national data and analytics infrastructure for the biosciences, helping researchers make their data and workflows FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

Launched in 2024, BioFAIR is a £34 million investment from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), delivered through the BBSRC and the Medical Research Council (MRC). It is organised around four interconnected “Commons” that together provide end-to-end FAIR data management, analysis and training for the UK life sciences — and, as a BBSRC-funded project ourselves, it’s a community we’re glad to be part of.

This fellowship sits naturally alongside the work we already do at Eco-Flow. From the start, our goal has been to build pipelines and training that make agri-ecology research more reproducible, accessible and scalable — exactly the principles that FAIR data is built on. This also fits well with the work of nf-core (of which we are a part), which strives to adhere to the FAIR principles by default (but there is always room to be more FAIR!).

What I hope to achieve

  • Bring agri-ecology into the FAIR conversation. Ecology and agriculture have often lagged behind fields like biomedicine when it comes to data infrastructure and tooling. I want to help close that gap.
  • Make reproducible workflows the norm. Our Nextflow and nf-core pipelines are a practical route to FAIR-by-default analysis, and I’d like to connect that work with the wider BioFAIR community.
  • Share standards and training. Through workshops, hackathons and documentation, I want to help researchers adopt FAIR practices without needing to become data engineers first.
  • Build connections. Fellowships are as much about people as outputs — I’m looking forward to learning from, and collaborating with, the other fellows and the communities they represent. Especially people using Snakemake, Galaxy and other workflow managers. We should all learn and appreciate the skills we can share as a biological community.

What’s next

I’ll share more as the fellowship gets going, including any events, training or resources that come out of it. If FAIR data and reproducible workflows are relevant to your research, get in touch — we’d love to hear from you.