Ranked among the top 100 universities globally, the University of Birmingham (UoB) is a prestigious Russell Group institution with a clear ambition to harness its transformative research and outstanding teaching to make a profound impact on the world. This ambition is powerfully realised through its global leadership in critical fields; it is a pioneer in integrating medical knowledge, and exerts international influence in materials safety and sustainability, solidifying its reputation as an institution that tackles some of society’s most pressing challenges.
UoB provides a uniquely trans-disciplinary ecosystem, where centres like the Birmingham Institute of Sustainability and Climate Action (BISCA) and the Centre for Environmental Research and Justice (CERJ), actively collaborate with the Centre for Health Data Science to tackle complex global challenges. This integrative approach is powered by cutting-edge ontology development and semantic knowledge mapping using Large Language Models, which break down disciplinary siloes to create unified data frameworks. This capability is critical to the university’s leadership in nano- and advanced materials safety assessment, informing robust Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) methodologies and application of green chemistry approaches to materials design. Underpinning all this work is a foundational commitment to FAIR data principles, ensuring that research from across these centres is interoperable and reusable, thereby accelerating the translation of scientific discovery into just and sustainable societal outcomes.
Professor Iseult Lynch is an environmental chemist working at the interface of chemical (and materials) pollution and environmental policy. She is the Director for Research of the UoB’s Centre for Environmental Research and Justice, an affiliate of the Birmingham Institute of Sustainability and Climate Action, as well as being Chair of DEFRA’s Hazardous Substances Advisory Committee advising the UK government on all aspects of chemicals in the environment. Iseult has a very broad overview of all aspects of nanomaterials and chemical safety assessment and Safe and Sustainable by Design of new materials, and plays a leading role in making toxicology research data and models Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) developing tools and workflows to support FAIRification.
Professor Georgios Gkoutos holds the chair of Clinical Bioinformatics, a joint appointment between the University of Birmingham Medical School and the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. He is Joint Director of the Centre for Health Data Science at UoB and deputy Director of the Centre for Environmental Research and Justice. George’s research spans clinical and biomedical informatics, health data science and translational phenomics to discover the molecular origins of human disease and develop novel disease diagnostic and intervention strategies. His expertise lies in the fields of integrative systems biology, biomedical knowledge formalization, standardisation, FAIRification and representation, multimodal large data harmonization, interoperability and integration, translational phenomics, Artificial Intelligence for Health, and multiomics, multimodal integrative analytics. He has developed a framework that has been adopted as an international standard, aimed at the systematic, holistic, representation of phenotype and disease data, with a particular focus in rare and complex diseases.
Dr Andreas Karwath is an Associate Professor of Health Data Science, with background in Computer Science, in the Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences, deputy programme lead for the MSc in Health Data Science at UoB. Andreas’s research interests focus on integrating routine clinical data and extracting actionable patterns using modern AI techniques, including transformer-based sequence modelling, variational autoencoders (VAEs) and learning-to-rank. Furthermore, he is interested in sub-phenotype discovery and risk prediction across chronic pain and perioperative recovery, diabetes and cardiometabolic disease, cancer risk, and predictive toxicology, with an emphasis on explainable tools that improve patient care.
Dr Alexe Haywood is a postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences at UoB. Alexe undertook an MSci and PhD in Chemistry at the University of Nottingham, graduating in 2024 with a focus on computational chemistry and machine learning. During her PhD, she collaborated with GSK to develop machine learning algorithms for predicting the yields of chemical reactions using structure-based descriptors. Alexe was also part of a prosperity partnership between GSK, the University of Strathclyde, and the University of Nottingham, which worked on identifying potential bromodomain inhibitors. Alexe used active learning to suggest potential drug molecules for synthesis.
Other team members at UoB contributing to the semantic work including ontology development and concept mapping are Dr. Indrani Mahapatra from the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Dr. Hui Yang and Dr. Dominic Russ from the Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences
As a key technical partner of the PINK consortium, the University of Birmingham team laid the strategic groundwork for the project, spearheading the stocktaking of data, models, and software to ensure a solid foundation upon which to build the PINK In Silico Hub (Task Lead for Task 1.1: Fine-Tuning the PINK R&I activities & stocktaking of available data, models, and software). A key early achievement was their collaborative leadership in developing the conceptual blueprint for the Semantic Interoperability Framework (Task Lead for Task 1.2: Conceptualisation of the Semantic Interoperability Framework), leveraging our world-class expertise in ontology development and chemoinformatics to ensure that diverse systems can communicate meaningfully.
Building on this strong start, the UoB team is now helping to drive the project forward by co-leading the implementation of this semantic framework (Task Lead for Task 5.1: Implementation of the semantic framework). Furthermore, we are actively applying our data science and machine learning expertise to tackle core project challenges. This includes developing advanced AI approaches for Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) assessment of chemicals and materials, such as generating novel chemicals and materials using VAEs and GANs (Contributor to Task 2.: Machine learning approaches and Task 4.4: AI-enabled SSbD). The UoB teams work is being directly applied and validated through dedicated demonstration case studies, proving the real-world impact of these methodologies. All of this innovation is underpinned by their foundational commitment to FAIR data principles and effective data shepherding, ensuring the project’s legacy of accessible and reusable data.
This combination of strategic leadership and technical excellence is key to ensuring the successful implementation of the PINK in silico hub and its underpinning knowledgebase.
