DAFNI Newsletter, December 2025

Welcome to the DAFNI December 2025 newsletter!

This year, DAFNI has achieved great progress in fostering research partnerships, launching new projects and broadening access to essential data and resources. Please see our 2025 highlights below to read about our achievements!

I am delighted to share with you the launch of our new website! This is a great improvement, showcasing the sheer breadth of topics we cover, and with everything more easily searchable from projects to case studies. In accordance with our long-term strategy, we want DAFNI to be a trusted platform. My thanks to all our partners, stakeholders and project leads for agreeing to share their logos on our website.

Last month’s newsletter showcased our DAFNI Fellows programme, due to start in April 2026. Applications will open on Friday 19th December and a webinar on 21st January 2026 will provide more information and the chance to ask any questions.

If you were unable to attend our conference in September, our post conference blog will update you on all the excellent talks and contributions on the day. Be sure to save 10th September 2026 in your new calendars for next year’s conference, to be held at Rhodes House in Oxford.

In the new year we will be contacting the DAFNI community with our statement of need for support for continuation of the DAFNI-DINI initiative (Data for National Infrastructuture), if this is of interest please get in contact with us on info@dafni.ac.uk.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our DAFNI team for their commitment this past year to technical excellence and to our user community. This continued drive has enabled DAFNI to grow and adapt to meet the evolving needs of scientific computing. Together with our users, we are producing cutting-edge research that addresses critical infrastructure challenges that will ultimately benefit our everyday lives.

On behalf of myself and the team at DAFNI, we would like to wish you all happy holidays and a restful break! We very much look forward to working with you in 2026!

Dr Brian Matthews, DAFNI Programme Lead

Highlights of 2025

2025 has been a busy and impactful year for DAFNI and our partners!  Thank you to you all and to our valued DAFNI strategy board! 

Highlights include: 

• Projects completing – BSRW and Sandpit projects completing. Impact report pending – Our Centre of Excellence projects including the eight funded ‘Building a Secure and Resilient World’ projects, three transport, three energy projects have finalised and shared their research on the DAFNI platform. We are currently finalising an impact report to showcase the projects benefits and research impact, please keep an eye out in the new year!
• DAFNI-DINI project successfully completing, showcase event, DINI project report, building for phase 2
• UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment (CGFI) project successfully completing, creating ‘basic’ and ‘expert’ accounts enabling stakeholder access, new data onto DAFNI
• Starting the UrbanAIR project (Urban simulation for air quality and heat resilience strategies), DAFNI is providing data and infrastructure expertise, Daresbury team members from STFC Scientific Computing are bringing their computational fluid dynamics expertise. CEDA are providing climate data expertise
• Starting the OpenLAND project exploring how changes in UK land use could create benefits for net zero targets, soil health, biodiversity and agriculture, using DAFNI for its benefits for a central place for collaboration and legacy
• CROSSEU projects developing the TEAL visualisation tool, enabling better metadata on the DAFNI platform
• NERC DS project – started the planning for integration with JASMIN to share data, will be available 2026

News from our central team

What the DAFNI Fellows Programme involves

Further to last month’s newsletter, the DAFNI Fellows programme launches on the 19th of December, with applications closing on 4 February 2026. For more information, sign up for our webinar taking place on 21st of January at 12pm.

DAFNI Fellows will be selected as part of the DAFNI programme’s strategic initiative to strengthen relationships with government, industry and academia, generate research outputs to our Centre of Excellence, and boost engagement with the DAFNI platform within the infrastructure engineering scientific community.

Fellows will be supported in developing and promoting their research with opportunities to present their work to the wider DAFNI network of academic, government and business partners and supporters. In addition, the DAFNI Fellows will receive support from the DAFNI team to share their research outputs with a wider audience through inclusion on the DAFNI platform.

Save the date for the 2026 DAFNI Conference – 10th September 2026

Rhodes House in Oxford.

We would be delighted to welcome you.

Hot topics to be discussed will include:

• Data in AI
• Infrastructure resilience
• Federated research

Registrations are open now.

More information will be circulated as speakers are confirmed.

On 12th September 2025, DAFNI held its annual conference at The Edge, University of Sheffield. This year’s theme was ‘Bridging the Gap between Academia, Industry and Government’.

Our keynotes included Dr Juliet Mian, Director of Arup’s Climate Services and Sustainability, “Making good choices” and Oliver Tones, Head of Data Sharing and Technology, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) “Learning to Fly: Research Data Access Pilots”. 

The sessions were expertly chaired by Dr Giuliano Punzo, Director of University of Sheffield’s Urban Flows Observatory and a member of the DAFNI strategy board DAFNI Science Lead, Tom Kirkham.

We were delighted to see so many delegates representing academia, government and industry and to hear the in-depth conversations and start of collaborative work with DAFNI and with each other during the breaks!

Read our conference highlights blog at https://www.dafni.ac.uk/resources/highlights/reflecting-on-our-2025-conference/ . 

Our first webinar of 2026 is ‘DAFNI Fellows’ on the 21st of January 2026 at 12pm.

We will cover the DAFNI Fellowship announcement of opportunity in more detail, discussing what the fellowship involves, funding available, application process, high level programme goals, the duration of the fellowship and eligibility. In addition, we will cover frequently asked questions and allocate time for questions from attendees.

If you are interested in this event please sign up the event here.

The DAFNI Fellows will launch on Friday 19th of December at midday. If you have any questions, please email info@dafni.ac.uk.

Watch our past webinars: Webinars – DAFNI

Catch up on conferences and interviews on our YouTube channel: DAFNI Facility – YouTube

Partnership News

DAFNI-DINI showcased at December 2025 Computing Insight UK conference

The Computing Insight UK (CIUK) event ran from 3rd – 5th December in Manchester. At the event DAFNI’s Science Lead, Tom Kirkham, presented a poster on the outcomes and recommendations of the DINI project. A key recommendation of the work was integration between the JASMIN data store and DAFNI. This work will enable DAFNI users to access a wider range of climate data and support ongoing work.

The conference itself was busy and a great opportunity to network with the wider community. Highlights included the increased focus on energy efficiency in both power and cooling for HPC and the increasing focus on giving access to compute to a wider range of end users, such as via the new HPC at the Hartree Centre.

Adding more data and models to DAFNI

Moving into 2026, DAFNI aims to add more datasets and models to the DAFNI platform through schemes such as the DAFNI Fellows but also by engaging with our user community. One area of work that we plan to focus on is how we can better link researchers on DAFNI to external users who wish to apply their research.

Supporting climate adaptation work

DAFNI is being contacted by an increasing number of organisations who are looking for solutions to support climate adaptation strategies. Global politics and the speed in which the climate is changing is driving industries from insurance to utilities towards the need for location-specific adaptation models. This presents a great opportunity for the DAFNI community to support this need, and also for us as a DAFNI team to facilitate the establishment of partnerships.

We will keep you informed via the newsletter on progress in this work. We welcome any suggestions and requests to make your work more accessible and attractive to users in the adaptation domain.

User liaison news

This November, members of the DAFNI team met colleagues from the CROSSEU Consortium at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, in a broad reaching meeting, where the development and implementation of the CROSSEU case studies was discussed. The results of these, once fully deployed on DAFNI, will be used by stakeholders across the European community to mitigate against the negative impacts of climate change. Eight case studies are currently being reviewed by the CROSSEU consortium, covering scenarios related to the impact of climate change on policy in Europe, at both local and national levels.

The first of the case studies covers the impact of heatwaves on mortality rates within the Czech Republic and the United Kingdom, and interested parties will have access to this information through the Decision Support System App – which will be available on DAFNI.

Other case studies cover a diverse range of scenarios which are of particular interest to European researchers and decision makers, and include the impact of drought conditions on Central and South-Eastern Europe, the development of flood conditions in the Alto-Adige and Trentino regions of the Alps, the impact of storm conditions on Northern Germany and Denmark, and the identification of avalanche risk areas in the Alpine and Carpathian mountain chains.

The impact of flooding conditions on the Lower Danube region, the robustness of the European Electricity network, in the face of climate change will also be tackled, along with a broad ranging study into the impact of climate change projections, on crop production, trade, productivity and various economic risk factors.

Annual CROSSEU meeting 2026 

These topics will be expanded upon during the annual CROSSEU meeting, which will be hosted by Meteo Romania, in Bucharest, in February 2026, which will cover all aspects of the CROSSEU programme.

DAFNI Platform Features and Updates

Over the last month, the DAFNI platform development team has been working on two areas in parallel:

• Work is now underway to enable our expert users to access their workflow logs through the platform’s web application, a much anticipated feature that we are excited to deliver in the new year.
• We have also been continuing our work to upgrade the web application to a more up-to-date and secure framework, with a focus this month on updates to group pages and the data upload process.

We sent out a message at the start of this month detailing our support arrangements for the DAFNI platform over the Christmas period. Our technical team will be out on much deserved annual leave from the 19th December to the 5th of January, during which time there will be no support for any platform issues. If you encounter any issues during this time, please raise them as usual and they will be picked up upon our return.

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 researcher speakers’ engagements

Professor Ana Mijic, Professor of Water Systems Integration at Imperial will be giving a lecture on “Thinking in water systems” on Wednesday 25 February (17.30–18.30 GMT). 

In this lecture, Ana will explore how systems thinking can help address interconnected challenges including flooding, drought, pollution and ecological degradation. Drawing on research in both the UK and India, she will show how understanding and modelling the whole water system can support better decision-making and a more sustainable, resilient water future.

📍 Lecture Theatre 200, City and Guilds Building

🎟️ Free and open to all, register: https://buff.ly/mfwyxVl

 DAFNI is delighted to work with Ana on the Water Systems Integration Modelling framework (WSIMOD) which is available on DAFNI with free access for researchers to use.  WSIMOD is a powerful integrated water systems modelling tool that simulates key processes across the entire terrestrial water cycle and will be of huge interest to researchers in infrastructure, water modelling and civil and environmental engineering.

Thanks to the WSIMOD team: Ana Mijic, Barnaby Dobson, Leyang Liu.

Community news

ISO22372 – the new international standard on infrastructure resilience has been approved and published 

Congratulations to all the national standards bodies representatives, experts and others who contributed, including Dr Liz Varga, Professor of Complex Systems at University College London and valued member of DAFNI’s Strategy Board.

Read more on how the new standard can help strengthen infrastructure resilience against a background of increasing numbers of extreme weather events and disasters at: https://www.iso.org/news/2025/11/ISO22372

The University of Birmingham’s Dr Joanne Leach, Emma Ferranti and Professors Afroditi Stathi, Simon Blainey and Chris Rogers, co-leads on the Healthy Low-carbon Transport Hub, are exploring how theories of change are used to support transport decision making and why a theory and practice of change that incorporates health and health inequalities is needed.

Read more about their research and why need to inform and engage the public on the health benefits of low-carbon transport choices is critical at: https://healthylowcarbontransporthub.ac.uk/2025/12/12/why-a-theory-and-practice-of-change-for-healthy-low-carbon-transport-is-needed/

DAFNI Technical training

A great opportunity to get up to speed quickly on DAFNI and to ask our technical experts your burning questions. Especially 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 (Wednesdays, 1:30pm-4:30pm) are available to book via Eventbrite (see weblink below).
Next training date: 4 February 2026

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