Susanna-Assunta Sansone is a British-Italian

data scientist Data science is an interdisciplinary academic field that uses statistics, scientific computing, scientific methods, processing, scientific visualization, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge from potentially noisy, struct ...

who is professor of data readiness at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

where she leads the data readiness group and serves as associate director of the

Oxford e-Research Centre The Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) is part of the Department of Engineering Science within the University of Oxford in England and is a multidisciplinary informatics and Data science research and education institute. The Centre was founded in ...

. Her research investigates techniques for improving the

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader de ...

reproducibility Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or ...

and integrity of data.

Early life and education

Sansone is from Italy. She was an undergraduate student at the

University of Naples Federico II The University of Naples Federico II (; , ) is a public university, public research university in Naples, Campania, Italy. Established in 1224 and named after its founder, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, it is the oldest public, s ...

. She earned her bachelor's degree in

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

microbiology Microbiology () is the branches of science, scientific study of microorganisms, those being of unicellular organism, unicellular (single-celled), multicellular organism, multicellular (consisting of complex cells), or non-cellular life, acellula ...

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

, where she worked in

St Mary's Hospital, London St Mary's Hospital is a teaching hospital in Paddington, in the City of Westminster, London, founded in 1845. Since the UK's first academic health science centre was created in 2008, it has been operated by Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust ...

. Her thesis investigated the role of the cofactored enzyme

superoxide dismutase Superoxide dismutase (SOD, ) is an enzyme that alternately catalyzes the dismutation (or partitioning) of the superoxide () anion radical into normal molecular oxygen (O2) and hydrogen peroxide (). Superoxide is produced as a by-product of oxy ...

in the

virulence Virulence is a pathogen's or microorganism's ability to cause damage to a host. In most cases, especially in animal systems, virulence refers to the degree of damage caused by a microbe to its host. The pathogenicity of an organism—its abili ...

of ''

Salmonella ''Salmonella'' is a genus of bacillus (shape), rod-shaped, (bacillus) Gram-negative bacteria of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The two known species of ''Salmonella'' are ''Salmonella enterica'' and ''Salmonella bongori''. ''S. enterica'' ...

''.

Research and career

After earning her doctorate, she moved to Microscience Ltd, where she characterised

vaccine A vaccine is a biological Dosage form, preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease, infectious or cancer, malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verifi ...

strains. In 2001, Sansone joined the

European Bioinformatics Institute The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is an intergovernmental organization (IGO) which, as part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) family, focuses on research and services in bioinformatics. It is located on the Wel ...

(EBI), part of the

European Molecular Biology Laboratory The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 29 member states, two prospect member states, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in ...

(EMBL) where she worked in research

data management Data management comprises all disciplines related to handling data as a valuable resource, it is the practice of managing an organization's data so it can be analyzed for decision making. Concept The concept of data management emerged alongsi ...

. Sansone joined the

in 2010. She became concerned that whilst there were vast amounts of data in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

, the majority of it was not reusable. To make data reusable, Sansone encourages researchers to combine their data with

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

: a description of what the data means. Sansone has described data reproducibility as “the foundation of every scientific field,”. Sansone's research investigates strategies to enable the creation of

research objects In computing, a Research Object is a method for the identification, aggregation and exchange of scholarly information on the Web. The primary goal of the research object approach is to provide a mechanism to associate related resources about a scie ...

that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). She co-founded the peer-reviewed journal ''

Scientific Data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally ...

'' in 2013, and serves as chair of the

Research Data Alliance The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global research community-driven organization started in 2013 by the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Department o ...

. She co-authored the

FAIR data FAIR data is data which meets the FAIR principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The acronym and principles were defined in a March 2016 paper in the journal '' Scientific Data'' by a consortium of sc ...

principles in 2016, a set of guidelines for the scientific ecosystem. FAIR principles have since been adopted by funding bodies, scientific publishers and the private sector. Sansone works with partners to deliver

data steward A data steward is an oversight or data governance role within an organization, and is responsible for ensuring the quality and fitness for purpose of the organization's data assets, including the metadata for those data assets. A data steward may ...

ship and data governance training and to develop guidelines to make data more accessible. She is one of the co-creators the FAIR Cookbook, an online resource for life scientists to enable them to keep FAIR data. Her research has been funded by the

Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds science, scient ...

(BBSRC) and the

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

Selected publications

Her publications include * ''The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship'' * ''ArrayExpress--a public database of microarray experiments and gene expression profiles'' * ''The OBO Foundry: coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration'' * ''The minimum information about a genome sequence (MIGS) specification'' * ''MetaboLights—an open-access general-purpose repository for metabolomics studies and associated meta-data'' * ''COVID-19 pandemic reveals the peril of ignoring metadata standards'' * ''ISA software suite: supporting standards-compliant experimental annotation and enabling curation at the community level'' * ''Toward interoperable bioscience data'' * ''Modeling biomedical experimental processes with OBI''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sansone, Susanna-Assunta Living people Italian emigrants to the United Kingdom University of Naples Federico II alumni Alumni of Imperial College London Academics of the University of Oxford Data scientists Women data scientists 21st-century British scientists Year of birth missing (living people)