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From Chemistry to Cohorts: My First Year at UK LLC
Sam Neale
29th Jan 2026
It’s almost a year since I joined UK LLC as a Data Research Software Engineer, having stepped into the role in February 2025, after making the leap from a career in chemical research. Looking back, it’s been an incredibly rewarding year.
From the very beginning, what stood out was how friendly and supportive the Data Team is, and I felt part of the team almost immediately. It was also evident how broad and ambitious the projects were, from improving the researcher experience through high-quality, user-focused content on UK LLC Guidebook (our flagship documentation resource), to designing and developing an ambitious online application management system, UK LLC Apply, that tracks and manages the entire lifecycle of research projects, from application to data provision to publications. This set the stage for the diverse and interesting work I would soon embark upon.
My initial focus was on developing a Python module to create and maintain unique identifiers (called “DOIs”) for resources such as datasets. This work, in collaboration with Katharine, our Senior Data Manager, who drafted the UK LLC Digital Object Identifier policy, has helped ensure our resources are more easily discoverable and citable in line with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. As part of this project, I built code to automatically generate and maintain Guidebook pages containing structural and descriptive metadata for all 650 datasets currently held in the UK LLC Trusted Research Environment (TRE). This represented a major step forward in the level of detail we provide to researchers about the data we hold, and it was incredibly rewarding to see these improvements go live and receive positive feedback.
I also contributed to our suite of Python and SQL-driven data pipelines, which perform critical data-processing tasks under the hood within our TRE. One highlight was streamlining the pipeline responsible for harmonising all the datasets and corresponding variables into a common format.
Beyond my development work, I’ve been contributing to a paper with Katharine outlining the governance and technical aspects of our large-scale NHS England record linkage protocol at UK LLC. Writing this paper has been an invaluable experience, exposing me to the complex governance challenges the team overcame to efficiently enable record linkage at such a scale. As part of this work, I was privileged to present at the Health Data Research UK conference in Glasgow. Sharing our methods with the wider health data research community and hearing about the innovative work happening across the sector was a particular highlight of my year at UK LLC so far.
The year ahead promises even more exciting and diverse projects. I’ll be contributing to the development of a t-TRE, a novel resource designed for teaching and training purposes which will host synthetic data. Additionally, we’ll be working with our infrastructure partners, Secure e-Research Platform UK (SeRP UK), to incorporate some exciting new data-centric tools and technologies to enhance our data engineering pipelines within the TRE for greater efficiency, and ultimately a better user experience for our researchers. We will also be developing an entirely new system that allows for management of all metadata associated with our datasets.
Overall, this first year has been productive and fulfilling, and I look forward to continuing to learn and contribute to UK LLC’s wider mission of advancing UK longitudinal population research.
Are you a researcher who works with large datasets as part of your research? Take a look at the linked data held in the UK LLC Trusted Research Environment to see if we can support your research: – LPS in the UK LLC partnership — UK LLC Dataset Documentation