Team members

David Osumi-Sutherland — Principal Research Scientist#

David is a biologist by background — working in developmental genetics research before switching to biocuration, ontology building and semantic solutions for organising and querying biological data. He leads the Cellular Semantics team, whose work focuses on designing and building highly scalable ontologies, standards and agentic-AI solutions for biomedicine, with a strong focus on supporting single-cell biology, atlasing and cross-species comparison.

• ORCID · Sanger profile

Uğur Bayındır — Semantic Web Developer#

Uğur develops, maintains and optimises the technical frameworks that drive our ontologies and tools, ensuring they remain accessible, scalable and interoperable for a diverse user base.

We’re hiring#

The team is growing. We are recruiting scientists and developers interested in ontologies, single-cell biology and agentic AI. If our work resonates with you, please get in touch via our GitHub organisation or David’s Sanger profile.

Former members#

We’re grateful to the colleagues who have contributed to the team’s work:

• Huseyin Kir — Senior Semantic Web Developer, specialising in semantic web technologies, knowledge graphs, multi-agent systems and NLP.
• Andrea Domínguez Rivera — Neurobiology curator, extending the Cell Ontology with brain cell types from BICAN data.
• Caroline Eastwood — Cell Ontology curator, capturing terms to improve datasets hosted on CELLxGENE.
• Jasmine Belfiore — Cell Ontology curator, contributing to the Human Cell Atlas in collaboration with the Cell Annotation Platform (CAP).
• Alida Avola — Scientific curator, working with the BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network on extending the Cell Ontology with brain cell types.