Dr Stelios Theophanous is a researcher at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and a contributor to the atomCAT programme in anal cancer at Leeds Cancer Centre. His work focuses on building international, digitally enabled research consortia that generate high-quality evidence in rare and under-studied diseases. His PhD examined how privacy-preserving federated analytic methods can enable robust multi-centre research without centrally pooling patient-level data, supporting international collaboration while remaining compliant with GDPR. Dr Theophanous will cover how the atomCAT consortium was built, how data quality and comparability were achieved across centres, what the collaboration produced, and what is required to sustain and scale such initiatives. The atomCAT2 study has been accepted in principle for publication in Nature Communications. Dr Theophanous’ work demonstrates how the right combination of governance, infrastructure and analytics can make high-quality international research feasible in diseases that traditionally struggle to attract sustained funding.