Trainers biographies

Tallulah Andrews

Dr. Tallulah Andrews has a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she used systems biology techniques to identify biological pathways linking orphan diseases. She entered the single-cell field in her postdoc at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where she developed and benchmarked single-cell tools including M3Drop, CycleMix and EllipsePseudotime. She returned to Canada to join the Liver Seed Network of the Human Cell Atlas at UHN in Toronto, and has recently been appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario, where she continues to develop tools for single-cell and spatial transcriptomics.

Wendi Bacon

Wendi’s academic experience and research interests lie in crossing scientific disciplines. As a PhD student, she applied developmental biology techniques in a cancer context, creating mouse and cell models for infant leukemia. As a postdoc, she continued her passion for method development in applying single cell transcriptomics in a reproductive biology context, examining the developmental defects occurring in cases of birth complications such as preeclampsia or fetal growth restriction. At the EBI, Wendi bridged the gap between wet-lab researchers and computer scientists to train biologists and develop bioinformatics resources as part of the Human Cell Atlas. Ultimately, Wendi enjoys learning and applying knowledge in new ways – scientists no longer need to be single entities in dusty labs, but can share expertise and knowledge to collaborate beyond what anyone could do alone.

Ana-Maria Cujba

I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Teichmann group at the Sanger Institute. I have a mixed background, with both laboratory and computational skills in the field of human epithelial biology and disease, stem cells and organoids.

Nancy George

Senior scientific curator at the EBI Gene Expression team

Alsu Missarova

I am a computational biologist and currently doing a postdoc in the lab of John Marioni. My main focus is on developing and applying methods for the integrative analysis of single cell data modalities (mainly scRNA-seq and -FISH based technologies).

Daniel O’Hanlon

I received my PhD in physics in 2017, where I worked on data analysis and computing for one of the Large Hadron Collider experiments. I am now a postdoc in the Petsalaki group at EMBL-EBI, where I develop techniques to identify and understand genetic interactions in cancer cells.

Iguaracy Pinheiro de Sousa

PhD in Medical Sciences at Heart Institute – USP (University of São Paulo, Brazil) where I combined a range of omics data and in vitro methods to better understand vascular disorders, focused on endothelium dysfunction. Currently, a postdoctoral fellow at EMBL-EBI analyzing scRNA-seq data to extract bi-directional cell signalling signatures. Experience in cellular and molecular biology, vascular biology and bioinformatics.

Enrique Sapena

Enrique studied Biology in the University of Valencia, where he also did his bioinformatics master. He is now currently working as a data wrangler for the Human Cell Atlas Data Coordination Platform (HCA-DCP) Ingestion Service, where he works maintaining the HCA metadata schema and acting as a data curator for submissions that are of interest of the HCA. This work has helped him gain expertise that ranges from single-cell data and metadata curation to data management and FAIRification of data. 

Elo Madissoon

Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stegle research group at EBM-EBI, and in Sarah Teichmann’s group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

Elo is currently working on single-cell and single-nuclei RNA-sequencing on the human lung with the goal of finding and characterising new cell types. Her original background is in the wet-lab, although for the past 5 years she has performed analysis of the data. Her experience includes analysing variety of cells types of different origin: cell lines, embryos, blood, CSF-fluid, oesophagus, spleen and lung.