Team members

David Osumi Sutherland - Principle Research Scientist#

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

Caroline Eastwood - Cell Ontology Curator#

Caroline has a MSc in Synthetic Biology and Biotechnology and joined the team in April 2024. She works to update the cell ontology by capturing terms that improve datasets hosted on CellxGene.

Andrea Rivera - Neurobiology curator#

Andrea is an expert glial cell biologist with a PhD in neurobiology. The main focus of his work is extending the Cell Ontology to add Brain Cell Types based on Brain Iniative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN) data, mapping these types to single

Huseyin Kir - Senior Semantic Web Developer#

Huseyin has a PhD in Computer Engineering and joined the team in August 2023,transfering from the Osumi-Sutherland team at the EBI which he joined in 2021. He specializes in semantic web technologies, knowledge graphs, multi-agent systems and natural language processing.

Uğur Bayındır - Semantic Web Developer#

Ugur has a Masters in X and joined the team in Feb 2024. He develops, maintains, and optimises the technical frameworks that drive our ontology, ensuring it remains accessible, scalable, and interoperable for a diverse user base.

Former members#

Alida Avola - Scientific Curator#

Following her PhD in Neuroscience, Alida joined the team in March 202]. She applied her backgound in single cell transcriptomicsand neurobiology primed to work with the the Brain Initiative Cell Consensus Network on extending the Cell Ontology with brain cell types.

Jasmine Belfiore - Cell Ontology Curator#

Jasmine has a MSc in Neuroscience and a BSc in Human Biology. Joining the team in April 2024 she applied her professional background in Medical Communications to accurately curating cell types and contributing to the Human Cell Atlas project in collaboration with the Cell Annotation Platform (CAP).