Sarah Teichmann

Sarah Teichmann
Head of the Cellular Genetics Programme, WSI
co-founded the Human Cell Atlas international initiative 
(ORCID)

Human Cell Atlas: Mapping the human body one cell at a time

The Human Cell Atlas (HCA) is an ambitious global initiative aiming to create comprehensive reference map of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease. Co-founded by Dr Sarah Teichmann from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, and Dr Aviv Regev from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in the US, the HCA was launched in London in 2016. The HCA’s ground-breaking approach is providing unprecedented understanding of human cells and tissue architecture in health and diseases including Covid-19 infection, cancer, respiratory and auto-immune disease.

Short bio

Sarah Teichmann is interested in global principles of regulation of gene expression and protein complexes, with a focus on immunity. 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, discovering stereotypical pathways of assembly and evolution of protein complexes during this time. In 2013, she moved to the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton/Cambridge, jointly with the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WSI). In February 2016 she became Head of the Cellular Genetics Programme at the WSI and co-founded the Human Cell Atlas international initiative which she continues to lead. Sarah was elected a member of EMBO in 2012, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2015 and a fellow of the Royal Society in 2020.