STFC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science

The Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science will train a new generation of PhD students to handle the enormous floods of data produced by modern scientific experiments. These students will learn to build and manage the computational systems, algorithms, and statistical tools needed to extract discoveries from petabytes of information—data volumes that overwhelm conventional analysis methods. This matters because many of the UK's most powerful research facilities, from particle colliders to genome sequencers to astronomical observatories, now generate more data than researchers can effectively process. Without specialists trained in data-intensive methods, the scientific return on these expensive instruments is limited. The programme addresses a critical skills gap: the shortage of researchers who can both understand the underlying science and write the code to analyse it at scale. If successful, the centre will produce cohorts of data scientists who can work across disciplines. While the immediate focus is on fundamental science—enabling discoveries in cosmology, particle physics, and genomics—the skills these students develop are directly transferable to industries that depend on large-scale data analysis, including healthcare diagnostics, climate modelling, financial systems, and autonomous technologies. The training model itself could become a template for how universities prepare researchers for a data-rich world.