📋 Tender Overview
Funded Value5348003Funded PeriodOct 19 - Mar 28FunderEPSRCProject StatusActiveProject CategoryTraining GrantProject ReferenceEPS0240931Building upon our existing flagship industry-linked EPSRC MRC CDT in Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science SABS the new EPSRC CDT in Sustainable Approaches to Biomedical Science Responsible and Reproducible Research - SABSR3 - will train a further five cohorts each of 15 students in cutting-edge systems approaches to biomedical research and uniquely within the UK in advanced practices in software engineering. Our renewed goal is to bring about a transformation of the research culture in computational biomedical science.Computational methods are now at the heart of biomedical research. From the simulation of the behaviour of complex systems through the design and automation of laboratory experiments to the analysis of both small and large-scale data well-engineered software has proved capable of transforming biomedical science. Biomedical science is therefore dependent as never before on research software.Industries reliant on this continued innovation in biomedical science play a critical role in the UK economy. The biopharmaceutical and medical technology industrial sectors alone generate an annual turnover of over 63 billion and employ 233000 scientists and staff. In his foreword to the 2017 Life Sciences Industrial Strategy Sir John Bell noted that The global life sciences industry is expected to reach 2 trillion in gross value by 2023... there are few if any sectors more important to support as part of the industrial strategy. The report identifies the need to provide training in skills in informatics computational mathematical and statistics areas as being of major concern for the life sciences industry.Over the last 9 years the existing SABS CDT has been working with its consortium of now 22 industrial and institutional partners to meet these training needs. Over this same period continued advances in information technology have accelerated the shift in the biomedical research landscape in an increasingly quantitativeand predictive direction. As a result computational and hence software-driven approaches now underpin all aspects of the research pipeline. In spite of this central importance the development of research software is typically a by-product of the research process with the research publication being the primary output. Research software is typically not made available to the research community or even to peer reviewers and therefore cannot be verified. Vast amounts of research time is lost usually by PhD students with no formal training in software development in re-implementing already-existing solutions from the literature. Even if successful the re-implemented software is again not released to the community and the cycle repeats. No consideration is made of the huge benefits of model verification re-use extension
