Postgraduate Opportunities

Carole has supervised 7 PhD's to completion and 7 MPhil candidates. She currently supervises 3 PhD students. 

Carole is looking for students with initiative who are able to develop an independent research agenda. She is particularly looking for students interested in the following areas:

- Novel methods for presenting complex provenance logs of workflows runs

- AI approaches to workflow sharing and reusing

- Mass curation of scientific protocols and workflows using AI

Research Group(s)

• Data Science Institute
• eScience
• Information Management
• Lazarus

Co-Director Manchester eScience Lab (founded since 2001), a multi-disciplinary group of scientific informaticians, computer science researchers and software engineers that focus on data intensive e-Science.

Joint Head of Node ELIXIR UK - 29 organisations (since 2016) - ELIXIR Europe, European Research Infrastructure for Life Science Data  -25 countries

Co-director Federated Analytics, Health Data Research UK  (since 2022)

Co-founder Software Sustainability Institute UK (since 2010)

Co-founder FAIRDOM Consortium for RDM in Life Science (since 2018)

Co-founder EVERSE European Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence (since 2023)

Co-lead FAIR Computational Workflows WG International Workflows Community Initiative (since 2022)

Co-founder BioFAIR: A UK National Data and Method BioCommons (Chair RTAG Committee since 2025)

Director Digital Infrastructure IBISBA, European Research Infrastructure for Industrial Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing (2017-2024)

Node Director Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute UK (2006-2010)

Selected Current Committees:

• UKRI Advisory Group for Digital Research Infrastructure (AGD) (UK)
• G7 Open Science WG, UK appointed expert member
• Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics SAB (Germany)
• Helmholtz Association Metadata Collaboration SAB (Germany)
• Sage Bionetworks Board of Directors (USA)
• National Dutch e-Science Center eSAC (Netherlands)

Awards and Fellowships:

• Microsoft Research Jim Gray e-Science Award (2008);
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to science (2014)
• The Carole Goble Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Paper in Computer Science, University of Manchester (awarded annually  since 2019)
• Doctorem Honoris Causa, Data Science, Maastricht University (2018)
• Microsoft Connect Vision Award (2013)
• Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2010)
• Fellow of the British Computing Society (2005)

Ranking

• ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholar – Lifetime (62 Bioinformatics)
• Research.com Computer Science Leader (2023,2024) -26^th in UK
• Deep Knowledge Analytics Top 100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare (2019)

Leader in Digital Research Infrastructures, translating technical innovations in distributed computing, semantic and metadata technologies, data and software sharing and computational workflows into FAIR and Open information solutions for scientists. 

Framed as "translational computer science" for Digital Research Infrastructure and Scholarly Communications, she is internationally recognised for her work on semantic web, metadata, ontologies, distributed computing and workflow management systems, and Virtual Research Environments for scientists. She collaborates with researchers world-wide, from many disciplines: Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Astronomy, Chemistry, Health informatics, Social Science and Digital Libraries.

A global leading advocate and thought leader for FAIR and Open Research; she is a co-author of the seminal paper on the FAIR principles for scientific data  and for FAIR Computational workflows.

She has pioneered work in semantically enabled middleware using FAIR Digital Objects, notably Bioschemas and RO-Crate. She currently runs open science global services WorkflowHub, ELIXIR-TeSS, FAIRDOM-SEEK, RDMkit and RSQKit. 

Carole is facinated by the social dynamics of how scientists and technologists work together to make and use Digital Research Infrastructure, and the cultural challenges for FAIR and Open Research. 

Notable pioneering results: 

• First ontology driven integration platform for bioinformatics (TAMBIS - 1996) 
• First open source computational workflow system for life science (Taverna - 2005)
• First open source computional workflow sharing platform (myExperment - 2007)
• First web service registry for life science services (BioCatalogue - 2007)
• First ontology for bioinformatics (the myGrid ontology, 1996) 
• Early Knowledge Graph technology for the pharmaceutical industry (open PHACTS - 2011)