DAFNI Newsletter, April 2026

Introduction

Our Conference theme this year is ‘Climate and Security Resilience’, with a dual focus on Government Industrial Strategy, and on Clean Energy. I am delighted to let you know that one of the afternoon workshops for our Conference will focus on the Government’s Industrial Strategy, specifically the Clean Energy Mission.

EPSRC Supergen hubs are leading this workshop for academia.

The Supergen Energy Networks Hub (SEN) is a £9m research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).  The hub brings together collaborative teams from Industry, Academia, Government and Civil Society to carry out highly impactful, interdisciplinary research, to enable energy networks to become a driving force towards a rapid, safe and just transition to net zero.

Book now for 10th September 2026 – we look forward to welcoming you to Rhodes House in Oxford.

It has been a busy month here at DAFNI and on 28th April, we held our DAFNI Fellows Kick Off Meeting to welcome our new Fellows, each of whom will become an ambassador for DAFNI. They will further sustainable research, promote their research within the DAFNI Centre of Excellence for Resilient Infrastructure Analysis, build networks across government, industry and academia and input into DAFNI’s Roadmap. We are thrilled to have our new Fellows on board and you can find out more about them below.

The video from our first webinar of 2026 is now available. Held on 22nd April this was  led by Professor Richard Kingston, Professor of Urban Planning and GIS at the University of Manchester. He shared how the NERC Digital Solutions Hub (DSH) is developing new approaches to connect, discover, and analyse environmental data across the UK research landscape.

Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead

News from our central team

This is a nationally competitive fellowship which focuses on infrastructure resilience, interdisciplinary research, and engagement across academia, government, and industry and offers the dual benefit of funding and an exciting opportunity for successful applicants to further their research and careers in infrastructure.

Research topics range from the latest AI techniques to compound hazards, extreme weather and best practice for improved decision-making.

Each DAFNI Fellow has been awarded £10,000 to support staff time, travel, knowledge exchange, conferences, and dissemination activities. The funds also support networking across government, industry & academia; building valuable networks by collaborating with influential stakeholders during workshops, conferences, and community engagement activities.

Fellows will receive training and guidance from the DAFNI team to integrate their data, models, and research outputs into the DAFNI platform for long-term accessibility and reuse.

Skills development & leadership opportunities will also be evidenced as Fellows will contribute to workshops, white papers, reports, and the annual DAFNI conference – building leadership, communication and technical skills.

The DAFNI Fellows starting their term from 1^st of April 2026 to 30^th of June 2027 are: 

• Ms Ji-Eun Byun, Lecturer in System Risk & Resilience, University of College London
• Mr Xiaohui Chen, Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Leeds
• Ms Yitian Dai, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at The University of Manchester
• Ms Amy Green, Research Associate at Newcastle University
• Mr Manuel Herrera, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Hydrology at Newcastle University
• Ms Qiuchen Lu, Professor at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London (UCL)
• Mr Thomas Mansfield, Data Systems Architect at Plymouth Marine Laboratory, University of Plymouth
• Mr James McKenna, Research Associate in Hydrodynamic Modelling at Newcastle University
•  Mr Khuong Nguyen, Associate Professor of Smart Transport at Royal Holloway University of London   Mr Mingshu Wang, Reader in Geospatial Data Science at the University of Glasgow

Feature case study

The RIWS project (Resilience for Integrated Water Systems) developed the WSIMOD (Water Systems Integration Model) and successfully implemented it onto the DAFNI platform, making it available to a wider research community. 

WSIMOD simulates the entire water cycle, allowing for comparison of resilience across different water system components, including supply, wastewater, flooding and water timely.

Results using analysis from WSIMOD demonstrate the resilience of different parts of the water system, now allowing researchers to directly compare both the supply and wastewater side.

The modelling also provides data on resilience of the water system to flooding as regards river pollution, an area not normally considered in resilience. WSIMOD allows researchers to quantify the resilience of infrastructure systems by measuring nitrate and phosphate levels. In England, this is a significant issue.

Click to download or read the full case study

The RIWS team:

Principal Investigator: Professor Ana Mijic, Professor Water Systems Integration, Imperial College London. Leyang Liu and Barnaby Dobson, both Research Associates at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London.

Join us at the 2026 DAFNI Conference

10th September 2026 at Rhodes House in Oxford

We would be delighted to welcome you. Our theme is ‘Climate and Security Resilience’ with a dual focus on Government Industrial Strategy, and on Clean Energy.

Tickets are £50 per person (£25 students)

Pre-registrations are open now.

DAFNI Webinar Series 2026

The recording from the 22 April 2026 is now available.  

Professor Richard Kingston  introduced the NERC Digital Solutions Hub (DSH) platform and demonstrated how emerging tools, such as AI-assisted data discovery and services built around Unique Property Reference Numbers (UPRNs), can help link environmental, infrastructure, and socio-economic datasets.

The session explored how the Hub enables researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to find and use environmental data more effectively and how DSH has collaborated with DAFNI to explore ways of connecting the DSH to JASMIN and other remote compute resources with opportunities for collaboration and user testing as DSH continues to evolve its next-generation digital infrastructure.

Watch online and access the slides

User liaison news

This April, Tom Kirkham, Science Lead, Kyle Stevenson, User Liaison Lead, and Elizabeth Mamchits, Software Engineer, from the DAFNI team, travelled to Brighton to take part in a joint Workshop and Hackathon with DISKAH –  the Digital Skills in the Arts and Humanities Network. 

In this highly collaborative effort, attendees, working with both DAFNI and local computing resources, used modern techniques to investigate combining data from Arts and Humanities projects with infrastructure datasets from DAFNI.

Using resources, such as the Archaeological Data Service, and Oxford University’s Seshat Global History database, and of course, the DAFNI platform, attendees investigated using varied and diverse datasets to explore issues surrounding how to best protect our rich cultural heritage in the UK – looking at issues such as flooding, landslides and the complex impact of transportation networks on heritage sites.

Links:

Archaeology Data Service

Seshat

Partnership news

In the past few weeks, a number of new UKRI funding opportunities have been launched through various different channels. This is a good signal that the budgets agreed for grant competitions between UKRI and DSIT are finally making it through internal processes and into public competitions, so it’s fair to say more will be on the way.

For the infrastructure community, a good example of this is within the Advanced Connectivity Technologies (ACT). ACT is one of five critical technology areas highlighted by the government (also including Quantum, AI, Engineering Biology and Compound Semiconductors). The last significant funding for this domain was back in 2023 under the UKRI Technology Missions Fund.

The new round of funding highlights a shift in approach within UKRI with respect to an increased focus on applied research and the support for exploitation of research based innovation. This is reflected in the funding being a co-ordination of different support mechanisms. These include standard grant support, contracts for innovation (ex SBRI funded at 100%) and other support for researchers to help exploit their innovation commercially.

More information can be found on the UKRI funding finder portal Opportunities – UKRI. New opportunities seem to now be appearing on a weekly basis and it is worth monitoring this channel as it spans all research councils.

At DAFNI, we are happy to support and partner with our community around opportunities for funding. This can be via a DAFNI letter of support or partnership / leadership in a bid. Please get in touch if you would like our support via info@dafni.ac.uk

DAFNI at ENSIGN digital twin showcase – putting integrated energy systems in the spotlight

Glasgow’s Technology and Innovation Centre at the University of Strathclyde hosted the ENSIGN Dissemination Event on 23rd April, drawing together academics, industry engineers and stakeholders to take stock of a major UK effort to build an Integrated Energy System Digital Twin. The DAFNI Programme is closely associated with the ENSIGN project and Bethan Perkins travelled up to represent DAFNI at this excellent meeting.

Backed through an EPSRC Prosperity Partnership and initiated by SP Energy Networks (SPEN), ENSIGN aims to model how electricity, heat and emerging vectors such as hydrogen interact as the UK pushes toward net zero. The day marked the midpoint of the project and the day combined “what, why and what next” framing with live demonstrations from the project’s work packages.

Speakers outlined the roadmap for the integrated twin and showcased a proof‑of‑concept electrical networks sub‑digital twin designed to explore neighbourhood‑scale impacts of low‑carbon heat scenarios. Sector sessions highlighted modelling for heat, hydrogen and industrial clusters, alongside discussions about how flexibility and optimisation tools could support planning decisions.

In an afternoon industry perspective, SPEN representatives set the research within a broader network strategy, emphasising the need for digital approaches that can cope with electrification, new assets and weather‑driven stresses.

DAFNI had some excellent discussions with project partners and partners from the associated TransiT project. We are looking forward to continued knowledge sharing and to working with both of these projects in the future.

DAFNI platform features and updates

This month you may have noticed that the DAFNI platform looks a bit different! We have now released most of our upgraded web application, bringing with it some exciting changes across the platform.

The catalogues for data, models, and workflows are now more visually aligned, displaying what level of access you have to each asset so you can easily tell if you’re able to run a workflow or download a dataset.

The details pages have also been updated to display metadata in a more cohesive way, alongside a new page where you can see a list of all previous versions of an asset. The team is still working away at updating the workflow building pages, so if you are an expert user you may notice yourself being redirected to the old site when creating a workflow – these pages will follow later this year.

Access our help

If you are a user of the platform and have any feedback or platform requests, please contact support@dafni.ac.uk

DAFNI researchers’ news

The Newcastle Urban Observatory portal has a fresh new look. The Observatory is led by DAFNI Strategy Board member Professor Philip James, Professor of Data Science at Newcastle University.

The platform provides open access to 10+ years of urban data amounting to billions of records from thousands of sensors across the city, including:

• Urban weather & X‑band rain radar
• Air quality
• Traffic and pedestrian counts
• Live views of the city, interactive graphs, and a full API

Access the portal at:

https://newcastle.urbanobservatory.ac.uk/

Dr Vassilis Glenis, Senior Lecturer in Hydroinformatics at Newcastle University’s School of Engineering, is co-editing a Special Issue on Blue-Green Cities and Infrastructure for Urban Flood Risk Management in MDPI Hydrology with Dr. Christos Iliadis, Dr. Lampros Vasiliades and Dr. Pierfranco Costabile.

🗓 Deadline: 31 December 2026

Get in touch with them via the link below:

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/hydrology/special_issues/XVK48X96UH

Vassilis is Principal Investigator on the SOFRAMODE (Sewer Overflow Flood Risk Analysis MOdel DAFNI Enabled)  project, powering flood mitigation measures in the UK and overseas: https://www.dafni.ac.uk/projects/soframode/

Community news

IDCC27, the 21st International Digital Curation Conference, will be held on 9-12 February 2027, in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference theme is FAIR DO’s: Centring People in the Stewardship and Curation of Digital Objects.

Find out more at: https://dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc27

Watch our past webinars

View recordings of past webinars at https://www.dafni.ac.uk/news-events/events/webinars/

DAFNI YouTube channel: catch up on conferences and interviews

Visit https://www.youtube.com/@dafnifacility118

DAFNI Technical Training

A great opportunity to get up to speed quickly on DAFNI and to ask our technical experts your burning questions. Highly recommended for those developing a research proposal and are thinking of including DAFNI as the platform of choice for the research.

Our technical training events on DAFNI are available to book via Eventbrite.

Keep an eye out for upcoming dates.

To attend the event you will need experience of entering code through a command line interface, for more information and to book, please visit: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/dafni-31793198351

Access our help

Please contact us directly for any assistance on info@dafni.ac.uk