Professor Emily Jefferson became the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Health Data Research UK in November 2022. She leads on the development and delivery of technology services to enable the provision of consistent and meaningful research access to health data. This includes the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway, which accelerates the discovery and access request management enhancing the ethical, secure, and transparent use of health datasets and other assets. Emily is leading the next stage of development which includes collaborating with Trusted Research Environment providers across the UK on federated analytics. Prior to her role as CTO, Emily was the Director of the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) at the University of Dundee for 10 years running a regional Trusted Research Environment and an academic research group. Emily has a degree in Biochemistry, a PhD in Bioinformatics and was employed as a post-doctoral researcher in Bioinformatics following her PhD. She then left academia to work in the finance sector. In industry she gained extensive experience of using “Big Data” and leading the delivery of large software and hardware projects.