Annual Showcase 2025

Introduction

We were delighted to release our 5 Year Strategy this time last year and are proud of the foundations laid and progress made over it's first year in practice. We made commitments to our key areas; Research & Innovation, Education & Training, Research Technology, Operational Enablement, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion and Environmental Sustainability and have been making strides to achieve our short, medium and long term objectives for each.

We're proud of the talented and hard-working people in and alongside our network and value their unique experiences and expertise. Read the showcase below to find various people news and stories of the past year.

Research & Innovation

Over the last 12 months, LIDA has been involved in 83 grant projects valued at £113.5m. 94% of these projects are supported via LASER, LIDA’s secure data platform. All research grant applications that LIDA supported ranged across our expertise in Health, Societies, Environment and Food for various funders, with a wealth of different partners across the public, private and third sectors.

We also launched our first LIDA Academic Fellowship role: a two-year position supporting an academic to help advance and set out an agenda for impactful data science and AI research within LIDA’s challenge areas.

Health

As part of our ambition to bring together researchers from a range of backgrounds and academic disciplines alongside external non-HE partners – this year we focussed on bringing together key opinion leaders from the public sector, industry and research in events.

Food

We seek to develop better data, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) methods and integrate them across the food value chain to address global food system challenges, such as diet-related ill-health, environmental sustainability and food security.

Our research programmes

Artificial Intelligence

The community have organised a few events this year, in partnership with other university teams, to bring AI specialists together including AI Research at Leeds: Building Connections Across Disciplines and the NVIDIA campus visit.

Immersive Technologies

The LIDA Immersive Methodologies Community has made significant contributions to global discourse on immersive technologies, publishing in leading outlets and presenting at high-profile international conferences this year.

Data Science Infrastructures

We are partners in the Communications Hub for Empowering Distributed clouD computing Applications and Research (CHEDDAR), focused on shaping the future of communications and distributed computing systems.

Data Visualization

This year we have hosted events, published papers, received research media coverage, spoken at events, won new bids and commenced new projects. We have also contributed towards LIDA 2024-29 Research Strategy areas.

Science of Data Science

We are LIDA’s newest programme and launched in June with an energetic event on “Meeting the AI and big data revolutions in quantitative social science”.

Our research eco-system

We're proud to work alongside, and collaborate with, a number of research centres and institutes across the university, hear from some of our affiliates on their work this past year...

Healthy and Sustainable Places (HASP)

HASP launched earlier this year as part of Smart Data Research UK and is dedicated to helping researchers use smart data to better understand the health and sustainability of places.

Centre for Immersive Technologies (CfIT)

This year’s activity has focused on advancing responsible, inclusive, and evidence-based uses of extended reality (XR) across healthcare, education, and data visualisation.

The Yorkshire Policing-Academic Centre of Excellence (TYP-ACE)

Launched in October 2025, this new research centre is part of the national network of nine Policing Academic Centres of Excellence, created by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and UKRI.

Strategic Partnerships

Alan Turing Institute

LIDA funded places for 10 PhD students to attend the Turing’s annual 2-day PhD Connect event as well as a number of places at AIUK, the Turing’s flagship annual data science & AI event.

Health Innovation Leeds

In 2025, the city has taken powerful partnership working to the next level across the ecosystem, including an important visit from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

N8

2024-25 saw LIDA work with the N8 Research Partnership to bring together data scientists, academics, policymakers, and people with lived experiences to find new answers to addressing childhood inequities.

Education & Training

People listening in a seminar room This academic year saw Leeds launch new data-science related MSc programmes and the exciting new undergraduate BSc Data Science.

Nationally and internationally, the important role of data and AI skills in education has been brought into sharp focus, particularly the use of GenAI by students, and how this fundamentally changes the nature of assessment and learning in many subjects.

LIDA has been at the forefront of these developments, providing leadership and space for collaborations.

Masters Courses at LIDA

In 2025, the new fully online MSc Data Science (Statistics) partnered between LIDA, Coursera, the School of Mathematics and the Digital Education Service saw its first cohort of students studying with us. The past academic year also saw the conclusion of our scholarship programme funded by the Office for Students.

Data Scientist Development Programme (DSDP)

Our award-winning programme completed it's 9th year of developing early career data scientists and solving real world problems for partners. The 2024-25 cohort of 8 LIDA data scientists worked on 16 different projects covering topics such as online spending patterns, patient safety, e-bike activity and crime analysis.

LIDA Open Data Science for Schools (LODSS)

LODSS is our widening participation initiative to inspire more young people, in particular those from areas of acute socio-economic disadvantage, to engage in digital skills and access digital careers. This year we ran two programmes of activity for the children of Keighley, Bradford.

Our education and training ecosystem

We're proud to work alongside, and collaborate with, a number of education centres across the university, hear from some of our affiliates on their work this past year...

CDT: Data Analytics & Society

The past year has seen a number of overseas institutional visits by students, including visits to Utrecht, Potsdam and Rostock. Many of our students have been presenting their work at major international conferences too, notably at the AAG in Detroit, UTSG in Dublin and the Global Tipping Points conference held in Exeter. Our students continue to engage with external organisations, with many of our students successfully applying for placement opportunities and Turing enrichment awards.

CDT: Artificial Intelligence for Medical Diagnosis and Care

During 2024 and 2025, members of the first two cohorts of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in AI for Medical Diagnosis and Care have been graduating successfully with their PhDs. Our researchers are going into AI and data science roles in industry, the NHS and academia, mostly within the health sector. This is an important milestone for the CDT towards our overarching aim of training research leaders of tomorrow to transform medical diagnosis and care through the application of AI.

Research Technology

Significant progress has been made towards all five of LIDA's Research Technology strategic aims; providing research computing infrastructure; developing processes and tools to improve costing and research recoveries; encouraging open research practice; delivering impactful research and innovation and being a trusted collaborator.

Alongside the continued operation of the University’s Trusted Research Environment (LASER), the Data Analytics Team have taken on more bespoke research collaborations, co-authored papers, been interviewed by international magazines, and presented at local & national conferences; all while streamlining and automating our internal processes. Watch Lydia's Project Video to hear about one of her focus areas this year.