Meet the Team

Professor Owen Rackham is a world expert in developing computational approaches for cell reprogramming and disease-gene association. His group focuses on identifying key regulators that control cell fate to find novel routes for cell conversion or targeted therapies. He has extensive expertise in high-throughput sequencing data, biological network analysis, and statistics. He co-founded Mogrify Ltd., developing cell therapy products for clinical applications, and is the theme lead for Cell and Molecular Medicine at the Alan Turing Institute.

Dr. Ahmed Dawoud is a research fellow in computational biology with a strong background in genetics and bioinformatics. He previously worked at University Hospital Southampton NHS Trust as a senior bioinformatician. Ahmed has a proven track record in studying age-related clonal haematopoiesis, a pre-malignant state linked to increased risk of blood cancers and non-malignant diseases. He earned his PhD at the University of Southampton under the supervision of Prof. Nick Cross and Dr. William Tapper, focusing on large-scale genetic datasets such as the UK Biobank. His work spans statistical genetics, population-scale genomics, and translational bioinformatics.

I am a PhD student in the Data-Driven Network Biology Group at the University of Southampton, where we develop computational approaches to understand complex biological systems. My research focuses on the cell regulatory network and machine learning applications in biology. I'm passionate about making accessible interdisciplinary computational tools that bridges computational biology, bioinformatics, and cell biology.

Disha is an iPhD student in Biomedical Sciences at the Centre for Cancer Immunology, working alongside Professor Sean Lim and Dr. Owen Rackham. Her research focuses on understanding T cell exhaustion in the context of immunotherapy, using single-cell and machine learning technologies to identify novel markers and improve cancer treatment outcomes. Her work aims to differentiate treatment responders from non-responders in B cell lymphoma malignancies.

Juri graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 2023 where in his thesis he looked at the impact of maternal immune activation on foetal brain development. In the same lab, he followed up, looking at the effects of the IL-17A signalling cascade on premature neurogenesis and excessive cortical folding. These have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders, in particular to autism spectrum disorder. Having started his PhD in Dr Owen Rackham's lab for data-driven biology in October 2024, he is now using computational approaches to identify sequence determinants of translational efficiency across human tissues. His work integrates state-of-the-art genomic foundation models including Helix-mRNA and RNA-Genesis with ribosome profiling and RNA sequencing data to predict cell-type-specific translation rates. The project aims to develop deep learning pipelines for rational mRNA design, with experimental validation planned in collaboration with Mark Smales' lab at the University of Kent using massively parallel reporter assays

I'm a PhD student and computational biologist working at the interface of network biology, single-cell transcriptomics, and machine learning. My current research focuses on foundation models for single-cell data, with an emphasis on rigorous benchmarking and clinical relevance. By integrating DNA sequence data with scRNA-seq, I aim to improve our understanding of cancer and rare genetic disorders, better informing diagnosis and treatment options.

I'm a PhD student in the Data-Driven Network Biology Group at the University of Southampton. My work combines biology and machine learning. My aim is to develop generative and interpretable models to explore single-cell transcriptomic data. I'm particularly interested in how we can use these models to reveal the features that drive cellular diversity, and to generate novel digital representations of human cells.