Thomas Mansfield

Welcoming Dr Tom Mansfield as a DAFNI Fellow!

Tom is a Data Systems Architect at Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML). He is one of 10 new DAFNI Fellows, selected from 116 applicants for the nationally competitive programme.

His Fellowship will explore federated data-architecture approaches to support collaboration and data sharing across UK offshore wind programmes.

Each DAFNI Fellow has been awarded £10,000 to support staff time, travel, knowledge exchange, conferences, and dissemination activities. The programme also helps Fellows build networks across government, industry and academia through workshops, conferences and wider community engagement.

Tom explains, “PML’s scientists are working tirelessly to explore and unlock the ocean’s secrets – and find solutions to pressing environmental issues. My role is to improve access to the data that drives this work while maximising the impact of emerging data to provide insights, accelerate collaboration, and improve decision making.”

“I’m very much looking forward to applying these approaches with DAFNI to support the UK’s offshore wind sector. Offshore renewable energy is going to play a critical role in the UK’s future resilience and sustainability, and better-connected data systems can help unlock more effective collaboration, faster innovation, and more informed decisions across the industry.”

Tom’s research interests lie at the intersection of federated data architectures, FAIR data stewardship and applications that support national infrastructure development. He is currently focused on data development for several national offshore wind power generation projects, leading the development of community-aligned data architectures designed to be interoperable, sustainable, and valuable to scientists and policymakers.

As part of the DAFNI Fellowship, Tom will investigate how federated data architecture approaches could improve the way environmental and infrastructure data are connected, accessed, and reused across UK offshore wind programmes.

Offshore wind projects generate vast and highly complex datasets spanning environmental monitoring, engineering performance, ocean conditions, and ecological impacts. However, these datasets are often distributed across multiple locations, organisations and systems, creating barriers to collaboration and slowing the delivery of actionable insights.

Tom’s research will explore how federated approaches – where data remains securely within organisations while still being accessible and connected across systems – could improve collaboration and support faster, more coordinated decision-making across industry, government, and research communities.

His Fellowship will promote DAFNI across the marine data community through demonstrations, workshops, and collaboration within the growing innovation ecosystem in Plymouth and across the UK.

The work will produce practical guidance and exemplars to help researchers generate reliable, reusable datasets that support future national infrastructure planning.

At PML, Tom specialises in the development of the skills, processes and technologies required to provide scalable and sustainable data infrastructures for marine and environmental science.

A central focus of his role is supporting researchers in the creation of high quality, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data. He works closely with scientific teams to make effective metadata creation achievable within real world research settings, ensuring that valuable data assets remain accessible, understandable, and reusable in a range of applications, including modelling, machine learning and decision support.