At Population Research UK, we’re committed to making UK Longitudinal Population Studies (LPS) easier to discover, access and use.
Researchers currently need to navigate multiple platforms and resources to find relevant LPS data. To address this, we’re pleased to announce a £1.625M investment in a new Population Research Gateway, to be developed by Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) following a competitive open funding call.
Led by Peter Harrison, Interim Chief Technology Officer at HDR UK, the project brings together expertise from Swansea University’s Secure eResearch Platform (SeRP), University of Nottingham and the Tissue Directory and Coordination Centre (TDCC).
The Population Research Gateway will provide a single, unified platform for discovering UK LPS, helping researchers find relevant datasets, compare studies, explore metadata, identify linked resources and navigate pathways to data access more efficiently.
Building on the existing Health Data Research Gateway infrastructure, the platform will also support the development of common metadata standards, greater interoperability across research resources and innovative new approaches to dataset discovery, including variable-level search and future AI-enabled capabilities.
These enhancements will make it easier for researchers to identify relevant studies, understand what data are available, and discover connections across research resources.
At launch, the Population Research Gateway is expected to make hundreds of LPS datasets discoverable through a unified platform, with plans to expand its coverage and functionality through close collaboration with the UK LPS community.
The work will build on existing discovery services by bringing together metadata from across the UK LPS in one place, making it easier for researchers to search, compare, and navigate these valuable resources.
We spoke to Peter Harrison about the vision behind the project, the opportunities it presents for researchers, and how the new gateway builds on and complements existing data discovery platforms.
Peter, why is now the right time for a Population Research Gateway?
The UK has an extraordinary wealth of LPS with the potential to transform our understanding of health, wellbeing, and our society.
Yet too often these valuable datasets remain fragmented, making them difficult to discover and access.
With multiple complementary initiatives across the UK research ecosystem, there is a unique opportunity to align infrastructure, metadata standards, and discovery services to enable new avenues of research and unlock the full value of these national assets.
What is your vision for this platform, and how do you hope it will transform the UK LPS landscape?
My vision is for the Population Research Gateway to become a trusted entry point to the UK LPS, making it simple for researchers to discover, understand, and access the rich data available across the ecosystem.
By bringing together harmonised metadata, intuitive discovery tools, and modern search capabilities, the platform will lower barriers to research, increase the use of these valuable national assets, and foster collaboration across disciplines while complementing existing study catalogues.
Ultimately, we hope it will make LPS data more visible, accessible, and reusable, accelerating research that improves population health and wellbeing.
What opportunities for researchers could become possible through the Population Research Gateway that are difficult to achieve today?
The Population Research Gateway will give researchers a single place to search across the UK LPS, making it much easier to identify relevant variables and linked datasets, and quickly understand what data are available for their research questions.
It is the variable level search and linkage across previously fragmented resources that will massively reduce the time spent finding data, allowing researchers to focus on addressing some of the UK’s biggest health and societal challenges.
The Population Research Gateway builds on the existing Health Data Research Gateway rather than creating a new platform from scratch. What advantages does this bring for the population research community?
Building on the Health Data Research Gateway provides a strong foundation, allowing us to focus investment on innovation rather than rebuilding the core basics of a metadata portal infrastructure.
It also ensures federation is built in from the outset, with a shared infrastructure enabling seamless discovery across LPS and wider health data assets.
By reducing duplication and improving interoperability, the Population Research Gateway will create a more connected research ecosystem.
As PRUK and HDR UK are aligned in their missions to simplify the data landscape, this partnership provides a strong foundation for long-term collaboration and greater value for the research community.
This project brings together expertise from across the research infrastructure landscape. Why is collaboration essential to delivering the Population Research Gateway, and what does each partner contribute to its success?
Collaboration is essential because no single organisation has all the expertise needed to deliver a truly connected discovery platform.
By bringing together UK SeRP, the TDCC, and the wider research infrastructure community, we can build on complementary strengths, trusted networks, and existing investments.
UK SeRP brings experience in LPS, trusted research environments, data management, and metadata harmonisation, while the TDCC contributes expertise in federated discovery and linking population studies with tissue and biosample resources.
Together, these partnerships will deliver a more connected and comprehensive discovery experience for researchers.
How will the Population Research Gateway complement existing discovery services, including the Cohort Discovery Service, and what unique role will it play for LPS?
The Population Research Gateway will complement existing discovery services by providing a dedicated discovery layer tailored to the unique needs of LPS.
Its role will be to make the breadth and depth of UK LPS easier to discover, understand, and reuse through richer metadata, federations, and advanced search capabilities.
The Cohort Discovery Service demonstrates the value of automated, real-time, cross-dataset queries, enabling researchers to identify suitable patient cohorts – in this case meaning number of people in data per condition or characteristic – more quickly while reducing the burden on data custodians.
The Population Research Gateway will complement this by enabling broader discovery through rich metadata and federated approaches, without requiring all datasets to adopt a single data model.
Looking ahead, what aspect of the Population Research Gateway excites you most – from advanced discovery tools and metadata standards to the potential use of AI-powered search?
I have spent much of my career focused on developing open innovative solutions to enable researchers to more easily discover and access data.
While I am hugely excited by the potential of AI-powered search to simplify the process of harmonising heterogeneous metadata and enabling more intuitive and natural language data discovery, what excites me most is using these technologies to create a simple, intuitive experience that helps researchers find and access the datasets they need with a lot less effort so they can spend more time on the research itself.
Closing thoughts
Enhancing discovery capabilities is a key part of PRUK’s delivery plan, and the Population Research Gateway marks an important milestone on that journey.
The investment responds directly to feedback from our stakeholder consultation, where the need for a searchable register of UK LPS was consistently identified as a priority.
By investing in this new platform, we are helping create a more connected, visible and accessible LPS ecosystem for researchers, study teams and the wider community.
“PRUK recognises that there are multiple discovery tools that represent different communities of LPS and provide services to act as information gateways to study metadata and data access, however the landscape is fragmented, and often experiences a lack of contemporaneous metadata.
Our vision is to unify the initial directory approach to finding LPS in terms of the consolidated register. This will then allow the progression to search and discovery at a more granular variable and research theme level by ensuring interoperability across specialist discovery platforms.
By funding this activity, PRUK wants to ensure studies are discoverable on the basis of up to date, correct, and uniform information and allow them the opportunity to manage their presence themselves, as well as enhancing researcher ability to discover and examine the possible use cases of studies via a single front door.
Our overall goal is to ensure discovery is as valid starting place as possible to inform the next step of applying for access, and provide efficiencies to studies, researchers, and access infrastructures respectively.”
Chris Orton, Population Research UK Technical Lead
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About Peter Harrison
Peter joined HDR UK in June 2024 as Deputy Chief Technology Officer, before taking up the role of Interim Chief Technology Officer in April 2026. Peter’s role is focused on convening the technology ecosystem and embedding a collaborative approach to data infrastructure that promotes open science and interoperability.
About HDR UK
Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) is the national institute for health data science. As a non-profit, HDR UK are connecting academia, government, industry and the public across all four nations of the UK to enable researchers, scientists and healthcare professionals to identify, understand and overcome the great healthcare challenges of our age through data. HDR UK’s Technology Team, led by Peter Harrison, is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Health Data Research Gateway, the new Population Research Gateway, the Cohort Discovery Service, and the Safe People Registry.
About our funding models
At Population Research UK, we’re committed to supporting a more interconnected data landscape, where users of LPS benefit from a seamless journey.
We’re established by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Medical Research Council and supported by a £9 million investment from the UK Research and Innovation Infrastructure Fund to deliver and commission services that enhance population research.
To achieve this, our delivery plan uses three complementary funding models: PRUK Hub to centrally deliver community engagement and advocacy; open calls to invite competitive applications where specialist delivery is needed; and partner-led funding applied where our UKRI partners – CLOSER and UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration – are best placed to deliver the work, building on existing UKRI supported infrastructure and avoiding duplication.
This project falls under the open call process.
