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.

Alida Avola - Scientific Curator#

Following her PhD in Neuroscience, Alida joined the team in [FIND DATE]. Their knowledge of single cell transcriptomics primed them for working with the Brain Initiative Cell Consensus Network with whom she works on classifying cells within the brain.

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. Her current focus is on capturing the cell types included in the Gut Cell Atlas completely by working with specialists in the field.

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.

Huseyin Kir - Senior Semantic Web Developer#

Huseyin has a PhD in Computer Engineering and joined the team in [FIND DATE]. 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 [FIND DATE]. He develops, maintains, and optimises the technical frameworks that drive our ontology, ensuring it remains accessible, scalable, and interoperable for a diverse user base.