TDCC Life Sciences and Health

The TDCC-LSH mission is to advance data-driven health and life sciences by harmonising data stewardship, improving interoperability of digital solutions, and developing the skills of researchers and data professionals.  

Roadmap TDCC-LSH 

The TDCC-LSH network builds on the extensive national network in data-driven life sciences and health built around the Dutch Techcentre for Life sciences (DTL) and Health-RI. The TDCC-LSH Roadmap was formulated after extensive consultation among stakeholders in the life sciences and health field (LSH). TDCC-LSH has three main ambitions to help strengthen the LSH fields:  

1. Harmonisation of good data stewardship and data access practices;
2. Enhancement of the interoperability of digital solutions and resources;
3. Strengthening the capacity and expertise base in digital research.  

These ambitions help steer the activities of the TDCC-LSH team and programme using the instruments initially available: network coordination funding and project funding from NWO.  

Network activities 

TDCC-LSH has strongly invested in establishing working relationships with major LSH community initiatives, most prominently via the large-scale research infrastructures (LSRIs), the Dutch node in the European research infrastructure for life sciences information (ELIXIR-NL), the Health-RI nodes (UMCs), the Dutch research data management and data steward community, as well as the national bioinformatics and computational biology community (BioSB). The TDCC-LSH activities primarily target domain-specific data professionals across data driven health and life sciences fields. TDCC-LSH is connected to the more discipline-agnostic needs, challenges and solutions through close collaboration with the other two TDCCs that focus on Natural & Engineering Sciences (TDCC-NES), and Social Sciences & Humanities (TDCC- SSH), respectively, and alignment with the local DCCs (LDCC) established at many research organisations and data generating facilities.  

Projects

TDCC-LSH has two types of project strands to support collaborative projects in the Life Sciences and Health domain: Bottleneck projects and Challenge projects. Five challenge projects were granted in the first TDCC project call (2023-2024); a second call was opened by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in 2025 (closing date was 20 November 2025). The bottleneck project “The TDCC-LSH FAIR fellowship programme: Building a network of experts for responsible handling of digital research data” was launched in April 2025.  The project “Open Collective research data workflow assembly to enhance FAIR practices across the Dutch Life Sciences and Health domain" funded by Open Science NL is running since June 2025.  An overview of all projects can be found on the TDCC-LSH website.  

Governance 

The TDCC-LSH is coordinated by Health-RI, following the formal merger of DTL into Health-RI in 2022/2023. The Programme Board oversees and helps steer the TDCC-LSH activities in line with the TDCC-LSH Roadmap, signals emerging challenges and help set priorities for addressing them.  

More information on the TDCC-LSH can be found on the TDCC-LSH website and in these public reports:   

• Two year report: van Gelder, C. W. G., Zwiers, K., Schoots, F., & Kok, R. (2024). Strengthening the Dutch data driven health & life sciences field: TDCC-LSH facts and figures September 2022- August 2024. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14292810   
• van Gelder, C. W. G., Zwiers, K., Schoots, F., & Kok, R. (2025). Thematic Digital Competence Centre for Life Sciences and Health (TDCC-LSH) Self-evaluation report - public version, September 2022- August 2025. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17582644  

The TDCC-LSH team at Health-RI:  

• Celia van Gelder (Network manager and Lead Training & Capacity Building)   
• Carla Strubbia (Community manager Health)
• Fieke Schoots (Training coordinator)
• Walter Baccinelli (Interoperability expert)
• Vedran Kasalica (Interoperability expert)
• Mijke Jetten (Lead Data stewardship)
• Petra Aarnoutse (Community manager Life Sciences)
• Meike Bunger (Community manager Life Sciences) 

Contact details of the TDCC team members can be found on the TDCC website and here; or write to: lsh@tdcc.nl