Teams
TREvolution brings together multidisciplinary teams and experts from a range of institutions and backgrounds, including computer science, data analytics, and public involvement and engagement.
University of Nottingham
The team at the University of Nottingham are leading the TREvolution programme. They provide international leadership in the adoption of federated tooling and working collaboratively with trusted research environments, technology providers and standards bodies to seek interoperability between solutions.
Primary contact: philip.quinlan@nottingham.ac.uk
University of Dundee
The University of Dundee team is expanding the SATRE specification, integrating features like federation and the TREvolution profile to support comparison of TRE capabilities. The team is also developing K8TRE, an open-source, SATRE-compliant and platform-agnostic TRE for other organisations to use or adapt.
Primary contact: HIC-Ops@dundee.ac.uk
University of Manchester
The University of Manchester team brings their vast, internationally renowned expertise in Standardised Metadata to the TREvolution programme. They aim to design the metadata across the programme and integrate within the infrastructure. A key component is the Five Safes RO-Crate being developed to address this challenge.
Primary contact: ro-crate@researchobject.org
University of the West of England
The University of the West of England team brings expertise developing core governance concepts, such as the Five Safes framework and statistical disclosure control for research outputs (SACRO), which underpins governance for TREs in the UK and further afield. They are developing both governance concepts for application within TREvolution and Semi-Automated Checking of Research Outputs (SACRO) for timely checking of research outputs.
Primary contact: james.smith@uwe.ac.uk
Swansea University
Swansea University is one of the teams spearheading the federated analysis features of TREvolution. In recent years they’ve pushed boundaries in this area with successful prototypes that broke new ground. Within TREvolution the aim is to bring this learning together into a mature federated analysis platform to accelerate research.
Primary contact: simon@chi.swan.ac.uk
University College London
The University College London team brings extensive experience in architecture development and maintenance of software and infrastructure for research purposes. This expertise has been applied within their own TRE, giving them expert knowledge to contribute to the development of the K8TRE open-source TRE product and SATRE specification within TREvolution.
Primary contact: t.machin@ucl.ac.uk
Research Data Scotland
Research Data Scotland (RDS) is supporting the communications and public involvement and engagement components of TREvolution. Drawing on their experience supporting previous DARE UK Driver Projects, RDS is helping to ensure that TREvolution activities and outputs are transparent, inclusive, and well understood by stakeholders and the public.
Primary contact: info@researchdata.scot
Lancaster University
Lancaster University brings expertise in the design of cloud-agnostic TRE infrastructures (KARECTL) and metadata-driven frameworks (CR8TOR) that aim to support the secure (5-Safes, FAIR) movement of data across TRE boundaries to enable scalable federated research. Leveraging its longstanding collaboration with Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust on secure data environments (NWSDE, LSCSDE) and its core research strengths in Data Science, Cybersecurity, and Health Informatics, the Lancaster team is well-positioned to drive the delivery and future adoption of K8TRE within TREvolution.
Primary contact: m.harding@lancaster.ac.uk
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have been pioneers in developing and operating Kubernetes-based, cloud-native Trusted Research Environments (TREs) for several years and operate the Lancashire and South Cumbria Secure Data Environment (SDE). They are also a TREvolution Early Adopter project (FOCUS-5) developing CR8TOR, a Kubernetes operator to support typical TRE operations and enabling federation through DataSHIELD, including deploying DataSHIELD on K8TRE. The knowledge and expertise gained during this process has made Lancashire Teaching Hospitals a driving force in the development of K8TRE a cloud-agnostic, open-source TRE being built as part of TREvolution.
Primary contact: vishnu.chandrabalan@lthtr.nhs.uk
University of Basel
Primary contact: alexander.kanitz@unibas.ch
University of Queensland
Primary contact: d.gorse@uq.edu.au
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
The team from the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre bring the understanding for the conditions in which software tools can be installed within NHS organisations. They have led the involvement of NUH in the federated programme of the NHS England Secure Data Environment programme and will bring this understanding to TREvolution.
Primary contact: alex.waldren-glenn1@nottingham.ac.uk
Contact the team
NHS Scotland
Primary contact: simon.rogers@nhs.scot
University of Cape Town
Primary contact: mamana.mbiyavanga@uct.ac.za
BC Platforms
BC Platforms is a global technology company that helps to accelerate medical innovation and improve health outcomes through advanced technology, predictive analytics and comprehensive patient data. As a longtime leader in the TRE space, we support research and development teams with functionality and interoperability between existing federated platforms using the GA4GH TES standard. This enables us to process Phenome-wide Association analyses (PWAS) and Genome-wide Association analyses (GWAS) from our secure platform.
Primary contact: james.walsh@bcplatforms.com
Medical Data Works
Medical Data Works provides professional support for vantage6 – an open-source federated learning platform – with a customer base of other 60 hospitals worldwide including 10 in the UK. In TREvolution they aim to connect vantage6 with TREs and showcase that these two solutions can be fully integrated.
Primary contact: andre.dekker@medicaldataworks.nl
Apheris
Apheris is a Berlin-based technology company pioneering federated computing infrastructure for secure collaboration on sensitive data. Within TREvolution, Apheris brings expertise in privacy-preserving interoperability between trusted research environments. The team is implementing and demonstrating the GA4GH Task Execution Service (TES) standard across federated platforms, showing how compliant systems can exchange and execute jobs seamlessly. This work strengthens the TREvolution goal of enabling true federation and interoperability across the UK data research ecosystem.
Primary contact: j.schoenauer@apheris.com
Unison
The Unison team brings deep expertise in multimodal data infrastructure, federation, and machine learning to the TREvolution programme and TRExt project. They have developed a middleware solution that enables seamless interoperability across fragmented healthcare datasets, allowing analysis as if from a single, unified source in any data model, including OMOP, while preserving data security, privacy, and sovereignty.
Primary contact: rory@hyperunison.com
Bitfount
Bitfount is the provider of a leading federated AI and data science platform, enabling data collaborations without data sharing. As part of TREvolution, Bitfount will be contributing its expertise in federated task orchestration by demonstrating cross-platform support for the GA4GH Task Execution Service (TES) standard to enhance interoperability between Trusted Research Environments.
Primary contact: naaman@bitfount.com
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