TDCC-LSH Organisation & Governance

The TDCC-LSH operates as a community platform. It is set up to connect a wide range of stakeholders and infrastructure initiatives around common challenges and solutions in data driven life sciences and biomedical research. Here, the TDCC-LSH builds on Health-RI and DTL as two existing national networks (merged in 2023), and on communities of data stewards (e.g. Data Stewards Interest Group) and computational biologists (BioSB) in the Netherlands. 

Financially supported by NWO to help strengthen digital research, a small team at Health-RI acts as the TDCC-LSH network coordination team. The TDCC-LSH coordination team communicates with all TDCC-LSH relevant stakeholders and coordinates the TDCC-LSH programme, which consists of network activities and projects. For the first phase of its programme, the TDCC-LSH activities follow the TDCC-LSH Roadmap that has been shaped upon an extensive field consultation among stakeholders across the broader fields of biology research and biomedical research.

A dedicated TDCC-LSH Programme Board has been set up to oversee and help steer the TDCC-LSH activities in line with the TDCC-LSH Roadmap and to signal emerging challenges and help prioritise responses to address these. The TDCC-LSH Programme Board meets 3-4 times per year to review progress in the TDCC-LSH programme, and guides the TDCC coordination team in its work with research communities in the LSH domain. NWO and ZonMw are observers to these Programme Board meetings. The TDCC-LSH Programme Board is in charge of selecting community-driven projects that will be set up under the TDCC-LSH umbrella with funding support from NWO or other funders. The TDCC-LSH coordination team communicates with NWO and selected project teams to monitor progress in these projects. 

TDCC-LSH Network coordination team






TDCC-LSH Programme Board

Members of the TDCC-LSH Programme Board have been selected to represent several major communities that can oversee the broad data driven Health and Life Sciences research domain:

Representatives of each of the four groups of the Roadmap Large Scale Research infrastructures (LSRI):

LSRI-Group Health Sciences
LSRI-Group Medical Sciences
LSRI-Group Green Life Sciences 
LSRI-Group Life Sciences & Enabling Technologies

Representatives from key national initiatives in data driven health & life sciences: 

BioSB (Bioinformatics and Systems Biology research and education) 
ELIXIR-NL (national node of the European ELIXIR infrastructure for life
sciences data) 
Health-RI (establishing the national health data infrastructure for
research and innovation).

Co-leads of the TDCC-LSH field consultation and Roadmap design appointed by NWO.


Composition of the TDCC-LSH Programme Board (per Nov 2023):
Prof. dr. Nine Knoers (Professor of Genetics  at UMC Groningen, on behalf of LSRI - Health Sciences Group)
Dr. ir. Koen Vincken (Associate Professor of Image Sciences Institute (ISI) at UMC Utrecht, on behalf of LSRI - Medical Sciences Group)
Prof. dr. Alain van Gool (Professor of Personalized Healthcare at Radboudumc, on behalf of LSRI - LSET Group)
Prof. dr. Hauke Smidt (Professor of Molecular Ecology at Wageningen University, on behalf of LSRI - Green Life Sciences group)
Prof. dr. Sanne Abeln (Professor of AI Technology for Life at Utrecht University, on behalf of BioSB)
Prof. dr. Jaap Heringa (Professor of Bioinformatics at VU-university Amsterdam, on behalf of ELIXIR-NL)
Prof. dr. Gerrit Meijer (Professor of Pathology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), CSO and Board member at Health-RI).
Dr. Ruben Kok (CSA and Board member at Health-RI, co-lead TDCC-LSH Roadmap, chair of the Programme Board) 
Prof. Dr. Vera van Noort (Professor of Computational Biology at Leiden University and at Leuven University, co-lead TDCC-LSH Roadmap)