Team

Jon Teague is the Director of COSMIC. Jon uses his wealth of experience in delivering high quality IT solutions in the Bioinformatics and Genomics fields, to head the COSMIC team, driving our mission and strategy. Jon has a keen interest in the development of bioinformatic resources to interpret cancer genomic data, and making the data available for the benefit of the scientific research and healthcare communities and the pharmaceutical/biotech sector.

Before joining COSMIC, Jon joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2000 where he set up the bioinformatics for the Cancer Genome Project. He was involved in the IT/Bioinformatics of the sequencing of the first two cancer whole genomes and the subsequent development of the algorithms and genomic analysis infrastructure to allow the scaling to thousands of samples. This led to a series of major scientific discoveries to include the identification of a number of cancer genes (including BRAF, PBRM1, CALR, SF3B1, COL2A1, UTX) and several novel mutational processes (chromothripsis and kataegis). Additionally, Jon played a pivotal role in the creation and development of the COSMIC database in 2004 as the technical co-founder.

Nidhi Bindal Dhir is the head of the COSMIC IT team. Nidhi uses her extensive experience and expertise in IT/Bioinformatics to manage and strategise COSMIC’s IT infrastructure.

Her strategy aims to make our Knowledgebase even more stable, secure and accessible for the scientific user community, to ultimately help human health. To achieve this, she leads a team of IT professionals with a vast range of expertise across bioinformatics, data engineering, web development and more.

Before joining COSMIC in 2009, Nidhi worked as a Research Assistant at Sheffield Hallam University, where she developed a graphical user interface for an automated colon cancer diagnostic system. With a background in IT and bioinformatics, Nidhi specialises in cancer diagnostic tools. She completed her MSc in Bioinformatics at Sheffield Hallam University in 2007.

Ilaria Fasanella is the Head of Commercial for COSMIC. She uses her wealth of experience in strategic commercial leadership within the Sequencing and Clinical Genomics sectors to advance COSMIC’s continuous development.

Ilaria supports COSMIC’s growth by securing the necessary funding through licensing, working closely with QIAGEN, looking for new collaborations and partnerships and overseeing marketing and communications.

Ilaria holds a PhD in Molecular Bio-Pathology from the University of Calabria and after a postdoc at the Marie Curie Research Institute (UK), Ilaria started her career in the life sciences industry in 2010 at Roche Diagnostics. Since then she has been passionate in her mission to bring the most cutting-edge technologies to clinical scientists and researchers across the world, empowering them in their work to save patients' lives. 

More recently before joining Sanger she was a key contributor to the success of PierianDx (now Velsera) a leading genomics company in the market. Here she was responsible for the international commercial strategy, building the entire customer base from the ground up, and leading the EMEA/ APAC sales team.

Karen McLaren is the Head of Product and Delivery for COSMIC. Having joined the Sanger Institute in 1994, she has a successful track record of project delivery including entire laboratory migrations and software system implementations.

Karen began her time at the Sanger Institute working for Sir John Sulston on the C.elegans Genome Project and has been a part of many key genomic initiatives including the Human Genome Project and Zebrafish Genome Project. As COSMIC’s Head of Product and Delivery, Karen is responsible for further evolving the product management strategy and overseeing change delivery initiatives, combining her proven experience in project and product management with her extensive background in genomics.

Karen holds a joint honours degree from The University of Surrey, where she majored in Biology.

Zbyslaw Sondka is the Head of Science. Zbyslaw uses his wealth of experience in cancer research to enhance effective use of global data, in order to understand the molecular background of cancer and utilisation of this knowledge for improving patient care.

Having had direct experience with the methodologies utilised in both wet and dry lab in cancer research, he is devoted to reducing the growing disparity between global capacity for producing large volumes of data and our ability to translate these data into clinically applicable knowledge. As part of this mission, Zbyslaw has been responsible for many significant COSMIC updates such as the re-evaluation and expansion of the Cancer Gene Census, the design and implementation of the Hallmarks of Cancer feature, and leading the design and development of the Cancer Mutation Census.

Prior to joining the COSMIC team, Zbyslaw investigated the role of topoisomerase II in aetiology of therapy-related leukaemias as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University. Before this, he earned his PhD in Biological Sciences, studying NOD2 gene polymorphism in patients with rectal, larynx and breast cancer at Nicolaus Copernicus University.

Sari Ward is the Head of Data Curation for the COSMIC Team. An expert in somatic mutation profiles of cancer genes and the histological classification of solid tumours, Sari specialises in literature curation of somatic mutation data across all human cancers. 

As COSMIC’s Head of Data Curation, Sari leads the data curation direction, strategy, and activities of the COSMIC database. Her team consists of experienced scientific curators who focus on somatic mutation curation. The team also promotes development of clinical metadata standards and efficient sharing of published cancer genomics data.

Before joining COSMIC and the Sanger Institute in 2010, Sari worked at Pfizer Global R&D doing computational biology. Her background is in cell biology and cancer diagnostics. Sari holds an MPhil in Biochemistry from Turku University, Finland.