Sarah Teichmann, PhD profile page

Sarah did her PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK and was a Beit Memorial Fellow at University College London. She started her group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 2001, where they described conserved pathways of protein complex assembly, and a “periodic table of protein complexes”, using biophysics and data science. After starting work on single cell genomics of T cells, in 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus where she was the first and to date only faculty member appointed across both the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute. There, she was a founding member of the Sanger-EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre. In 2016, Sarah was appointed as Head of the Cellular Genetics programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and co-founded the international Human Cell Atlas consortium. This initiative creates reference maps for cells across all human tissues and has grown to include over three thousand members across the world. She also co-directs the CIFAR MacMillan Multiscale Human research programme. From April 2024, Sarah has taken up the chair in Stem Cell Medicine at the University of Cambridge, Department of Medicine/Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. She now also spends part of her time at GlaxoSmithKline, and the startup company she co-founded, EnsoCell Therapeutics. While maintaining a molecular and biophysics perspective, Sarah’s laboratory has developed and applied cell atlas technologies to decipher human tissue architecture, with a particular focus on how cellular diversity is generated in the immune system and through development. Her work has been recognised by numerous awards, including the EMBO Gold Medal, Genetics Society Mary Lyons Award, Biochemical Society GlaxoSmithKline Award, the FEBS|EMBO Women in Science Award among others. She is an EMBO Member, ISCB Fellow, and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and Royal Society.