People

David has a PhD from the University of Cambridge in Organic Chemistry and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto in Canada.

He joined GSK in 2007 initially in the Process Chemistry group to develop manufacturing processes for small molecule therapies. Through his time at GSK he has held project leadership and line management roles in R&D and led research and technology transfer programmes between R&D and Global Manufacturing. Before joining Open Targets David was engaged in developing and implementing strategic projects for GSK through a secondment to the office of the CEO and CFO as part of the CEO’s Future Strategy Group.

David joined Open Targets in 2017 as Strategy and Operations Director, and oversaw the management of a number of informatics and experimental target validation projects as well as ensuring the strategic deployment and operational translation of Open Targets. In 2023, he was appointed Executive Director of Open Targets.

As Scientific Director, Gosia Trynka leads the overarching scientific direction of the consortium and deputises for the Director as required.

Gosia also leads the Immune Genomics group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her group is focused on translating genetic variants associated with immune diseases to function. The group combines immune cell assays with a broad genomic toolkit (from chromatin activity mapping through large scale single cell RNA-seq studies to CRISPR screens) to understand the role of human genetic variation in regulating the immune system.

Gosia earned her PhD in 2011 from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Cisca Wijmenga. During her PhD she became actively involved in international efforts that used genome wide association studies (GWAS) to map variants predisposing to immune diseases. She then undertook postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Boston where she joined groups of Dr Soumya Raychaudhuri and Dr Robert Plenge. Her work included development of methods that integrate GWAS variants with functional genomics readouts to inform the role of disease associated variants, e.g. in nominating causal cell types.

Ellen (Ellie) McDonagh joined the Open Targets as the Informatics Science Director in April 2020. As Translational Informatics Director, Ellie leads integrated informatics and data science strategies across projects, platforms, and core teams.

Prior to joining the Open Targets team, she was the Head of Curation and Pharmacogenomics at Genomics England. She helped pioneer a crowdsourcing platform (PanelApp) for the expert review and curation of gene panels, which are used in genome interpretation for rare disease and cancer patients and the NHSE Genomic Medicine Service.

Ellie also led projects to expand the scope of information analysed in patient genomes. These included health-related additional findings, and evidence-based pharmacogenetics to support the prediction of drug responses to improve patient safety and therapeutic outcomes.

Before joining Genomics England, she worked as a Scientific Curator at the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB). In this role, she produced clinical guidelines regarding therapeutic recommendations based on a patient’s genotype, provided critical assessment of evidence for gene-drug associations, and published genetically associated pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic pathways.

She is on the Science and Industry Advisory Board (SIAB) for ELIXIR-UK and the Steering Committee for The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network, and is an active member of the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium.

Birgit has been actively engaged in establishing technology transfer at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) more than 16 years ago and over the years she held various positions at EMBL’s technology transfer arm, EMBLEM.

In addition, she is currently responsible for business development at EMBL-EBI and Open Targets. Birgit has been engaged in starting companies out of EMBL, as well as in managing and licensing intellectual property in a number of fields with biotech and large pharma companies as customers.

She holds a diploma in biology from Philipps-University Marburg, did her PhD work in molecular developmental genetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for biophysical chemistry in Goettingen with Michael Hoch and a postdoc with Stephen Cohen at EMBL Heidelberg. She is a member of BIO Deutschland and the Licensing Executives Society as well as an alumna of St Gallen Business School, CEIPI, Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, DFG and EMBO.

Jason is Senior Principal Scientist, Functional Genomics at Pfizer. He leads a team that is using functional genomics tools for target identification and validation across diverse therapeutic areas.

Jason received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he studied mechanisms of human cell transformation at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He did postdoctoral research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, exploring circulating microRNAs as cancer biomarkers and developing a microRNA-based screening system. Expanding beyond his initial focus on oncology, Jason joined the Broad Institute as a Research Scientist and developed functional genomics screens for target discovery in mitochondrial disease.

Hayley joined the SLT in May 2022. She is Director – UK External Collaborations, Strategic Partnerships at GSK, previously Hayley worked at Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Mathew leads the Translational Cancer Genomics laboratory and Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer Project at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Mathew’s team uses high-throughput drug sensitivity screens and genome-editing technology in cancer and normal human cells to understand how cancer genes contribute to disease and to facilitate the development of new treatments.

After obtaining a BSc in Biochemistry (Hons.) at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Mathew completed his PhD with Prof. Richard Marais at the Institute of Cancer Research (London, UK) on the characterisation of BRAF as a cancer gene. In 2005 Mathew moved to the laboratory of Prof. Ashok Venkitaraman (Cambridge, UK) for his post-doctoral research, where he discovered a new regulator of cell division. Mathew joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2009.

Xinli Hu is Director of Human Genetics in Pfizer’s Systems Immunology group.

Her career in genomic sciences began at the Broad Institute as a genetic and flow cytometric data analyst after earning a Bachelor of Science in Bioengineering from the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2015 she earned her PhD from Harvard University upon completion of thesis research studying the genetics (including HLA fine-mapping) and cell-specific functional genomics in autoimmune diseases, under the supervision of Dr. Soumya Raychaudhuri at the Broad Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She also received an MD degree from Harvard Medical School.

Xinli joined Pfizer in 2016 and now leads the human genetics group at Pfizer’s Inflammation and Immunology Research Unit. Her team focuses on translating genetics and epigenetics findings into evidence supporting drug targets, with an emphasis of integrating genetics with orthogonal multi-omics data types including functional genomics.

Donald is Head of Precision Oncology Bioinformatics at Sanofi.

He is an experienced bioinformatician with expertise in target discovery, target validation and biomarker discovery for oncology and immuno-oncology.

Shameer Khader is an Executive Director of Precision Medicine and Computational Biology at Sanofi, Cambridge MA. He leads a global team that leverages trans-disciplinary (biomedical, healthcare, and clinical) big data and machine intelligence approaches to accelerate drug discovery, development and repurposing. He has more than a decade of experience building and leading bioinformatics and data science in academia and industry. Prior to Sanofi, he was Senior Director of Machine Learning Research at AstraZeneca, USA and lead precision medicine and data science teams at leading health systems (Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai and Northwell Health) and healthcare technology companies (Philips).

He obtained his PhD in computational biology from the National Center for Biological Sciences in India and completed his MPH from Imperial College, London. He completed his post-doctoral training in computation genomics and precision medicine at the Mayo Clinic. His contributions to biomedicine using applied machine intelligence includes more than 130 peer-reviewed research papers and conference abstracts.

Multiple national and international media outlets featured his work on healthcare data science, bioinformatics, drug discovery, and precision medicine, including Forbes, Fast Company, Bloomberg News, and Times of India. He received multiple awards for his research contributions; His work on developing an open catalog of drug repositioning has won the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics’ Bioinformatics Resource Innovation Award in 2017. Recently, he was recognized as one of the 100 Artificial Intelligence Leaders in Drug Discovery & Healthcare (DKI Global and Forbes). He gave a TEDx Talk on Saving Lives Using Biomedical Data Science.

Maria is the Team Leader of Protein function developments at EMBL-EBI. She manages the bioinformatics infrastructure of the Universal Protein Resource (UniProt), the world leading database of classified and functionally annotated protein sequences. Her group also manages and develops software for the Gene Ontology annotation and the Enzyme portal projects.

She holds a M.Sc. in Veterinary Medicine and a PhD in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, and she has been working in developing infrastructure for scientific data for 19 years. Her research interests include the study of novel methods for protein function prediction, and protein annotation and visualization.

Mark McCarthy joined the SLT in 2022. He is Principal Fellow at Genentech, Executive Director of Human Genetics and co-lead of Translational Genomics.

Prior to his move to Genentech in 2019, Mark was the Robert Turner Professor in Diabetic Medicine at the University of Oxford.

Ola Olow is Director, Computational Biology and Functional Genomics Analytics, Data, AI & Genome Sciences at MSD.

Evangelia Petsalaki’s research group studies human cell signalling in healthy and disease conditions. The group uses interdisciplinary approaches, including data-driven network inference, modelling of cell processes and data integration, to understand how different environmental or genetic conditions affect cell signalling responses leading to diverse cell phenotypes.

Evangelia has a PhD in structural bioinformatics from EMBL and the University of Heidelberg (2009) and did her post doctoral work at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute in Toronto, Canada (2010-2016).

Federica Piccioni is Senior Director, Dept of Data, AI & Genome Sciences at MSD.

Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen joined the SLT in 2022. She is Senior Fellow at Genentech, Executive Director of Cell and Tissue Genomics and co-lead of Translational Genomics.

Orit is a pioneer in single cell genomics technologies and their application to tissues in order to better understand health and disease. Prior to her move to Genentech in 2020, Orit was the Scientific Director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Photo credit: Maria Nemchuk

Daniel is a Scientific Director in the department of Human Genetics and Genomics at GSK. He leads a team developing computational methods for the interpretation of genetic and genomic data for drug discovery.

Prior to joining GSK, he was an EIPOD postdoctoral fellow at EMBL-EBI, analysing genomic data from iPS cell lines and iPS-derived cell types. This included an Open Targets project focused on Parkinson’s disease, mapping eQTL in iPSC-derived dopaminergic neurons and predicting in vitro differentiation efficiency.

Roser joined the SLT in May 2022. Roser leads a research team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Roser’s research is focused on the adaptation of immune cells in tissues and their function in steady state and inflammation. Her team uses genomics, spatial transcriptomics and bioinformatics tools to reconstruct the microenvironment that will shape immune cellular identity and function.

Megan Bennett provides EA support to Gosia Trynka and her team, across both Human Genetics and Open Targets. She sits within the Operations Team in both programmes, providing administrative support to underpin operational flow.

Helena Cornu is responsible for all communications involving Open Targets. This includes our social media, blog, newsletters, and press releases.

With a degree from the University of Edinburgh, Helena’s background is in biomedical sciences, and has previous experience in science journalism and podcasting.

Jess is a Senior Research Manager at Open Targets. She joined the team in June 2024 from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she worked as a Research Manager in the Cellular Genetics programme.

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Paris is the Open Targets Senior Administrator and provides day-to-day support to our Executive Leadership Team.

Paris has over 10 years experience working as an administrator and has worked on the Wellcome Genome campus for the past 7 years learning lots about the way of working within both Sanger and EBI.

Sarah is the Open Targets Data Manager and joined the team in July 2021.

Prior to joining the Open Targets team, Sarah worked as a Case Investigator with Texas A&M Health Science Center on a COVID-19 contact tracing project and completed a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology with a concentration in genomics and bioinformatics.

I’m a Londoner, born and raised (mostly). For my undergraduate degree, I stayed in London and studied Biological Sciences at UCL. I then followed this up with a Bioinformatics MSc at the University of Copenhagen and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. For my PhD, I was based in the Anderson group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and my thesis revolved around integrating population-scale single-cell transcriptomic data with germline genetics to better understand the biology of inflammatory bowel diseases. I joined Open Targets as a single-cell data scientist in 2024.

Follow me on Twitter to keep up with my science!

Annalisa joined Open Targets as a product manager in June 2022.

She first joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as part of the GWAS Catalog, where she curated genetic evidence to improve target identification and prioritisation.

Before starting her role at EBI, Annalisa conducted her predoctoral and postdoctoral research in Genetics of Sensory Function at EMBL Rome, Wellcome Sanger Institute and King’s College London.

Annalisa holds a PhD in Medical Genetics and a M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Naples, Italy.

Get in touch with Annalisa if you have questions about the Open Targets bioinformatics products and stakeholders.

Daniel studied genetics at Queen Mary University of London (BSc) before attending Cambridge to complete his MPhil in Epidemiology. As a bioinformatician his research has involved looking at how gene and protein expression data can be leveraged to better understand breast and ovarian cancer.

As a computational biologist within the Open Targets Genetics team, his work involves the incorporation of new data sources and analyses to assist in drug target discovery.

Carlos is a Web Developer for Open Targets. He is involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the web platforms, the improvements of the final user experience, and the implementation of new features.

He is also constantly looking for better development experience, besides modern technologies, to offer a cutting-edge project.

Carlos enjoys building data visualisations and modern platforms tools for scientific and research purposes, and he has worked in diverse data-driven industries, from IoT (Internet of things) to Healthcare.

Ricardo Esteban Martinez Osorio is a full stack developer working across the Open Targets Platform and Genetics teams.

Javier is joined the team in 2024 as a Backend Software Developer. He now leads the Backend team.

Jack has a background is in mathematics (BSc) and computational biology (MPhil). His PhD project was focused on the functional genomics of Rheumatoid arthritis, exploring cell-type specific functions underlying existing GWAS associations.

As a statistical geneticist in the Open Targets Genetics team, Jack currently focuses on developing and integrating tissue enrichment analysis for all publicly available GWAS into the Genetics portal.

James joined Open Targets in 2023 as a software developer working in the back-end team. He previously worked in the Samples, phenotypes, and ontologies team at EMBL-EBI.

Vivien is a bioinformatician in the Open Targets data team. She joined the team in July 2024.

Irene is a bioinformatician working on the Open Targets Platform and Open Targets Genetics. She joined the team in 2020.

Graham McNeill is a web developer in the Open Targets front-end team. He joined in 2024.

Chintan joined Open Targets in 2022 as a web developer in the front-end team. Chintan is involved in developing and improving the Open Targets Platform and Genetics.

Prior to joining Open Targets, Chintan was focused on creating interactive digital experiences on the web and worked on various web technologies like Angular, React, Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

David Ochoa joined Open Targets in 2019 as Platform Coordinator.

David is involved in setting the scientific strategy for the OT Platform and related projects, day to day management of core database projects - including the team that generates the OT Platform - and setting priorities in line with agreed strategy together with Project Management.

Prior to joining Open Targets, David obtained his PhD while using computational methods and network biology for predicting protein-protein interactions. After graduating, he joined as a postdoctoral fellow the group of Pedro Beltrao at EMBL-EBI to better understand human signalling under perturbation and disease by leveraging the growing body of large-scale proteomics data and the latest computational approaches in data analysis and machine learning.

Daniel obtained a PhD in structural biochemistry from Eötvös Loránd University, studying charged single alpha helices, a protein structural motif, using various biophysical methods.

Following this, he undertook postgradual work at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco. While at UCSF, he studied the HER family of receptor tyrosine kinases that play critical roles in cancer development, establishing an experimental in vitro system to study structure-function relationships of these proteins.

He has been working as a Senior Bioinformatician on the Wellcome Genome Campus since 2015, first within the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Analytical Genomics of Complex Traits research group, then in EMBL-EBI’s GWAS Catalog developr team.

He now leads the data team at Open Targets, who develop and maintain the data processing and integration pipelines, and actively develop our data models to ensure Open Targets’ informatics tools provide the most relevant answers to our users.

Szymon studied at Lodz University of Technology (BEng). He started his professional carrier in Children’s Health Memorial Institute in Warsaw where he was working on the rare diseases treatment in Polish population.

Since 2021 he worked as a software developer and bioinformatician in multiple start-ups focused on drug target discovery, whole genome sequencing and clinical trials validation. As a bioinformatician his work involved looking over the connections between co-linked gene mutations and providing predictions on gene functionality.

As a senior computational biologist within the Open Targets Szymon is considered to be a bridge between the Genetics and Data teams to support and lead the development and implementation of the Open Targets Genetics pipelines for drug discovery and target prioritisation.

Yakov obtained his PhD in Statistical Genetics from Novosibirsk State University. He worked on the developing approaches for studying non-additive models and applied them to study the genetics of human metabolome.

In 2018, Yakov became a group lead in the Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS. His research focus was the development of new multivariate approaches and rare variant analysis approaches and its application to study the genetics of human lifespan, back pain and varicose veins.

Yakov joined Open Targets in 2022 as a senior statistical geneticist in the Genetics core team to integrate novel genetic approaches for better prediction of drug targets. He became Genetic Analysis team leader in 2023.

Prashant is the Project Manager for Open Targets Platform and Open Targets Genetics. He is responsible for leading the project management strategy and ensuring timely deployment on the products as per the release cycles and quality criteria. Prashant is always looking to interact with stakeholders both from academia and the industry.

Prior to joining open targets, Prashant was working with a life sciences MLOps startup. He has also worked for various global pharmaceutical organisations as well as niche biotech companies in the informatics and data science domain.

Emma Duncan joined Open Targets as a Senior Research Assistant in September 2020.

During her PhD at Queen Mary University London, Emma studied a rare neurodegenerative disease, Autosomal Recessive Spastic Ataxia of Charlevoix Saguenay. In particular, she researched the cellular consequences of disrupted sacsin function in patient fibroblasts.

She then pursued postdoctoral studies at the Babraham Institute’s signalling department, where she focused on the autophagic protein degradation pathway.

Now in the Open Targets Validation Lab, Emma is validating targets from large genome-wide CRISPR-Cas9 screens in oncology.

Stuart is a Principal Bioinformatician with the Open Targets Validation Lab.

Eloise Lockyer joined the Open Targets Validation Lab in July 2024 as an Experimental Oncology Technical Specialist.

Salman studied at Swansea University, graduating with a PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology, with a focus on cancer.

He joined Open Targets in 2021. As an Advanced Research Assistant in the Validation Lab, Salman is working to generate experimental evidence towards identifying new routes to therapeutic intervention in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Panos Zalmas joined Open Targets as the Head of the Open Targets Validation Lab in October 2019.

Panos graduated from the University of Oxford with a PhD in Oncology and Cancer biology. His research focused on DNA damage response control of E2F-7 and E2F-8. He went on to work at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London, before joining the Validation Lab at Open Targets.