Every day, we generate data simply by living our lives – from the apps tracking our morning run to the NHS recording our health appointments.
For many communities, this data isn’t just a vulnerability to be managed; it’s potentially a powerful tool for social and political change. Environmental groups use air quality data to hold polluters accountable. Patient communities pool health data to accelerate research into rare diseases. Neighbourhood organisations leverage local data to campaign for better services. Yet unlike other professions born from power imbalances and the vulnerabilities they entail – medicine, law – we have no equivalent professional class trained to help communities harness this power. We have no data stewards.
This gap between data’s potential as a tool for collective action and our ability to wield it effectively isn’t just a policy problem. It’s an education crisis. And the Centre for Data Futures at King’s College London has launched what may be the UK’s first endeavour to address it: the Data Empowerment Clinic. Led by Suha Mohamed, it is the first dedicated educational infrastructure designed to train a new generation of data professionals who can help communities unlock the power of their data, not just protect themselves from its misuse.
What makes a profession “missing”
Consider this: when you’re ill, you rely on doctors whose professional obligations require them to prioritise your wellbeing. When you need legal representation, lawyers are bound by duties to act in your best interests. But when your health data, location history, or browsing patterns are being negotiated for use in AI training, algorithmic decision-making, or commercial exploitation – who represents you?
The answer, currently, is largely no one. We’ve responded to our growing data vulnerability with top-down regulation like the GDPR, which is crucial but insufficient. Rights on paper don’t automatically translate into practical power, especially when individuals face off against well-resourced data controllers alone. What’s missing is the intermediary layer: independent professionals trained to represent groups of data subjects, to negotiate on their behalf, and to monitor data-sharing agreements over time.
This is what makes data stewardship the “missing profession of the 21st century”: not because people aren’t managing data (they are), but because the professional infrastructure to serve communities’ interests simply doesn’t exist. There are plenty of data protection officers serving organisations, but vanishingly few professionals trained to represent the people whose data is at stake.
When universities address missing professions
The consequences of this absence became starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. We faced an agonising dilemma: either accept increased surveillance to enable essential public health tools, or protect privacy at the cost of forsaking potentially life-saving data-dependent interventions. Had community-led data empowerment structures with trained stewards already existed, we might have navigated this tension more effectively. Communities could have collectively negotiated terms, set boundaries, and monitored safeguards – all while enabling crucial data sharing for the public good.
This isn’t hypothetical hand-wringing. The lack of data stewardship infrastructure has real-world costs: eroded public trust, abandoned data-sharing initiatives like care.data (a former NHS initiative designed to extract data from GP surgeries into a central database to improve health services and research), and widening power imbalances between individuals and institutions. Recent backlash against UK Biobank’s data-sharing plans – despite built-in consultation mechanisms – demonstrates that consultation alone cannot substitute for genuine empowerment through professional representation.
Universities are uniquely positioned to address this capability gap. Just as medical schools responded to advances in medical science by gradually professionalising medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education institutions can help build the professional infrastructure for twenty first century data stewardship. The question is whether we’ll take decades to do it – or whether we’ll move with the urgency the moment demands.
A bold experiment
Launched in October 2025, and funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the King’s College London’s Data Empowerment Clinic represents something new: a collaborative “think-and-do” space where students gain hands-on experience in data empowerment practices while supporting real-world communities and organisations.
The model is deliberately interdisciplinary. Students from across King’s work alongside experts and community partners to tackle challenges at the intersection of governance, technology, and ethics. This isn’t theoretical training; students are engaging with actual organisations in education, health, and creative industries, grappling with thorny questions about how communities can harness data for collective benefit.
In practice, this might mean helping a neighbourhood group use environmental data to campaign for better air quality. It could involve supporting patients who want to pool their health data to accelerate research into new treatments. Or it might mean working with creative industry workers exploring how to protect their intellectual property in an age of generative AI.
Beyond the classroom
What makes this educational infrastructure significant is its recognition that building a new profession requires more than coursework. Along with the clinic’s experiential learning opportunities, the Centre for Data Futures has developed “Skilling for Data Empowerment” in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation – modular learning materials on ethical and participatory data practices designed for students, academics, and practitioners.These materials address the full spectrum of what data stewards need: understanding what data empowerment means, enabling meaningful participation at the point of data generation, identifying the operational, legal, technical, and ecosystem requirements for effective support, and translating concepts into practice across different contexts.
This is professional training with an infrastructure mindset. Just as medical education doesn’t simply produce individual doctors but builds the foundation for medical boards, standards-setting bodies, and oversight mechanisms, our approach recognises that training data stewards requires building the ecosystem in which they’ll operate. The clinic explicitly aims to support grassroots data empowerment movements globally, not just in the UK.
The implications for higher education
What we are attempting matters beyond data stewardship. It’s a model for how universities can respond to urgent societal needs by creating new professional pathways, not just new degree programmes. It recognises that some challenges require what we might call “accelerated professionalisation” – building in years what historically took decades.
This raises important questions for the sector. How do universities balance the need for rigorous professional training with the urgency of societal challenges? How do we build professional standards and ethics when the profession itself is still emerging? And how do we ensure that tomorrow’s data stewards develop the technical expertise, ethical grounding, and institutional legitimacy they’ll need?
The stakes extend to students as well. As our economy becomes increasingly data-dependent, graduates who can navigate the complex intersection of technology, governance, and community interests will be invaluable. But these aren’t just career skills – they’re civic competencies that will shape how we manage one of our most precious collective resources.
A profession worth building
Our clinic cannot solve this issue alone so the question now is whether other universities will follow suit – and whether we’ll move quickly enough. Data empowerment structures are already being experimented with around the world, but they’ll struggle to scale without trained professionals to staff them. We don’t have centuries to let this profession emerge organically. We need to build it deliberately, rapidly, and well.Just as we’d be shocked to learn that no one was training doctors or lawyers, future generations may look back and wonder why it took us so long to train the professionals who could help us navigate our data age with dignity and power. Thanks to the Centre for Data Futures at King’s College London, at least now we’ve started.
Find out more about the Data Empowerment Clinic and how to get involved here.