Karen Ambrose is the Chief Data Officer at The Francis Crick Institute (one of Europe’s largest Biomedical institutes) and she is responsible for the Data Management Strategy for both scientific research and enterprise data. Karen is working to change the data culture and increase the data literacy across the institute. Karen also heads up the Data Management and Analytics Platform Team, as part of Information Technology Office (ITO) and Scientific Computing, with the remit for the management of operational and scientific data. The team is the main point of contact to assist staff in finding solutions for gathering, storing, analysing, visualising and sharing their data. Providing a data service to manage operational and scientific data to drive data driven solutions and develop scientific data workflows, with responsibility for all the operational and scientific data systems at the Crick, storing everything from genetic data collected by a research group to employees’ HR information.

Karen has previously worked at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, as part of the team working on the Human Genome Project. In addition to the day job, she is also the Co-Chair of PRISM, Crick’s Race Equity staff network, Sponsor for the EDI Data working group, analysing the EDI data that is collected and reported on to inform the wider Crick community, helping to socialise the data and create a dialogue and she also holds a position on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Committee, under which several actions and initiatives are being progressed which feed into the overall EDI strategy for the institute.