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Susheel Varma, PhD MBA FBCS

Short Bio

Susheel Varma, PhD MBA FBCS, is Chief Data Officer at Sage Bionetworks, where he leads a team of 55+ professionals managing a $40M+ annual portfolio of biomedical data infrastructure across cancer, neurodegeneration, rare disease, and digital health programmes. He co-leads the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) AI Work Stream, serves on the UKRI Infrastructure Advisory Committee, and sits on the Scientific and Industry Board of the Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project. Previously CTO of Health Data Research UK and founder of the AI and Data Science team at the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, his career spans academia, government regulation, and non-profit research across continents, with a consistent focus on open science, FAIR data principles, and international standards for responsible data sharing.

Long Bio

Susheel Varma, PhD MBA FBCS, is Chief Data Officer at Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit biomedical research organisation based in Seattle. He leads the Science and Data team of 55+ professionals, overseeing a $40M+ annual portfolio spanning 50+ concurrent initiatives funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIA, NCI, NINDS, NCATS, ARPA-H), foundations (Gates Foundation, AACR, Children’s Tumor Foundation), and commercial partners. His team builds and operates multi-petabyte data infrastructure supporting cancer genomics (HTAN, AACR GENIE, MC2), Alzheimer’s and exceptional longevity research (AMP-AD), rare disease programmes (AMP-ALS), and digital health initiatives.

An advocate for open science and international standards, Susheel co-leads the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) AI Work Stream, serves on the UKRI Infrastructure Advisory Committee, and sits on the Scientific and Industry Board of the Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project and the MONARCH Initiative. He has contributed to GA4GH standards including Beacon, the Tool Registry Service (TRS), Workflow Execution Service (WES), and Data Repository Service (DRS), and championed FAIR data frameworks now adopted across genomics and health research internationally.

Previously, Susheel founded and led the AI and Data Science Technology Policy team at the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, where he co-authored the Guidance on AI and Data Protection and the AI Risk Assessment Toolkit, influencing regulatory practice across public and private sectors. He provided strategic guidance on high-profile programmes including NHS England’s Federated Data Platform, Our Future Health, and Great Ormond Street Hospital’s DRIVE initiative.

As Chief Technology Officer at Health Data Research UK, he managed a £69M+ infrastructure portfolio and built teams of 200+ specialists. He established the national Trusted Research Environments (TRE) network, creating federated infrastructure connecting 200+ data custodians serving 45,000+ researchers, and led the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway and the DARE UK programme. His TRE principles and best practices paper remains a foundational reference for the international health data research strategy.

At EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute, Susheel managed the EOSC-Life and EOSC-Hub European research infrastructure programmes across 50+ partner institutions, and coordinated ELIXIR’s Human Data Communities. Earlier, at the University of Sheffield, he served as CTO and Translational Technology Officer, delivering cloud platforms for computational biomedicine and coordinating 25+ research projects with combined budgets exceeding €30M.

Susheel holds a PhD in Computational Systems Biology from the University of Sheffield, an Executive MBA in Management of Research Infrastructures from the University of Milan-Bicocca, a Master of Science in Advanced Software Engineering from the University of Sheffield, and a Bachelor of Technology from Pondicherry University, India. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Lifetime Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery. He has delivered keynote addresses at joint European Commission and WHO sessions on FAIR data for pandemic preparedness, as well as at International Data Week. His publications appear in Cell Genomics, Nature Reviews Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, NeurIPS, the BMJ, and JACC, among others.

Selected Publications (See CV for more details)