People

David has a PhD from the University of Cambridge in Organic Chemistry and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto in Canada.

He joined GSK in 2007 initially in the Process Chemistry group to develop manufacturing processes for small molecule therapies. Through his time at GSK he has held project leadership and line management roles in R&D and led research and technology transfer programmes between R&D and Global Manufacturing. Before joining Open Targets David was engaged in developing and implementing strategic projects for GSK through a secondment to the office of the CEO and CFO as part of the CEO’s Future Strategy Group.

David joined Open Targets in 2017 as Strategy and Operations Director, and oversaw the management of a number of informatics and experimental target validation projects as well as ensuring the strategic deployment and operational translation of Open Targets. In 2023, he was appointed Executive Director of Open Targets.

As Scientific Director, Gosia Trynka leads the overarching scientific direction of the consortium and deputises for the Director as required.

Gosia also leads the Immune Genomics group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. Her group is focused on translating genetic variants associated with immune diseases to function. The group combines immune cell assays with a broad genomic toolkit (from chromatin activity mapping through large scale single cell RNA-seq studies to CRISPR screens) to understand the role of human genetic variation in regulating the immune system.

Gosia earned her PhD in 2011 from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Cisca Wijmenga. During her PhD she became actively involved in international efforts that used genome wide association studies (GWAS) to map variants predisposing to immune diseases. She then undertook postdoctoral training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Boston where she joined groups of Dr Soumya Raychaudhuri and Dr Robert Plenge. Her work included development of methods that integrate GWAS variants with functional genomics readouts to inform the role of disease associated variants, e.g. in nominating causal cell types.

Ellen (Ellie) McDonagh joined the Open Targets as the Informatics Science Director in April 2020. As Translational Informatics Director, Ellie leads integrated informatics and data science strategies across projects, platforms, and core teams.

Prior to joining the Open Targets team, she was the Head of Curation and Pharmacogenomics at Genomics England. She helped pioneer a crowdsourcing platform (PanelApp) for the expert review and curation of gene panels, which are used in genome interpretation for rare disease and cancer patients and the NHSE Genomic Medicine Service.

Ellie also led projects to expand the scope of information analysed in patient genomes. These included health-related additional findings, and evidence-based pharmacogenetics to support the prediction of drug responses to improve patient safety and therapeutic outcomes.

Before joining Genomics England, she worked as a Scientific Curator at the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB). In this role, she produced clinical guidelines regarding therapeutic recommendations based on a patient’s genotype, provided critical assessment of evidence for gene-drug associations, and published genetically associated pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic pathways.

She is on the Science and Industry Advisory Board (SIAB) for ELIXIR-UK and the Steering Committee for The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network, and is an active member of the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium.

Birgit has been actively engaged in establishing technology transfer at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) more than 16 years ago and over the years she held various positions at EMBL’s technology transfer arm, EMBLEM.

In addition, she is currently responsible for business development at EMBL-EBI and Open Targets. Birgit has been engaged in starting companies out of EMBL, as well as in managing and licensing intellectual property in a number of fields with biotech and large pharma companies as customers.

She holds a diploma in biology from Philipps-University Marburg, did her PhD work in molecular developmental genetics at the Max-Planck-Institute for biophysical chemistry in Goettingen with Michael Hoch and a postdoc with Stephen Cohen at EMBL Heidelberg. She is a member of BIO Deutschland and the Licensing Executives Society as well as an alumna of St Gallen Business School, CEIPI, Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds, DFG and EMBO.

I’m a Londoner, born and raised (mostly). For my undergraduate degree, I stayed in London and studied Biological Sciences at UCL. I then followed this up with a Bioinformatics MSc at the University of Copenhagen and a PhD at the University of Cambridge.

For my PhD, I was based in the Anderson group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and my thesis revolved around integrating population-scale single-cell transcriptomic data with germline genetics to better understand the biology of inflammatory bowel diseases. I joined Open Targets as a single-cell data scientist in 2024.

Follow me on Twitter to keep up with my science!

Annalisa is the Senior Product Manager at Open Targets.

Annalisa joined Open Targets as a Product Manager in June 2022.

She first joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as part of the GWAS Catalog, where she curated genetic evidence to improve target identification and prioritisation.

Before starting her role at EBI, Annalisa conducted her predoctoral and postdoctoral research in Genetics of Sensory Function at EMBL Rome, Wellcome Sanger Institute and King’s College London.

Annalisa holds a PhD in Medical Genetics and a M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Naples, Italy.

Get in touch with Annalisa if you have questions about the Open Targets bioinformatics products and stakeholders.

Daniel studied genetics at Queen Mary University of London (BSc) before attending Cambridge to complete his MPhil in Epidemiology. As a bioinformatician his research has involved looking at how gene and protein expression data can be leveraged to better understand breast and ovarian cancer.

As a computational biologist within the Platform’s genetic analysis team, his work involves the incorporation of new genetics data sources and analyses to assist in drug target discovery.

Carlos is a Web Developer for Open Targets. He is involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the web platforms, the improvements of the final user experience, and the implementation of new features.

He is also constantly looking for better development experience, besides modern technologies, to offer a cutting-edge project.

Carlos enjoys building data visualisations and modern platforms tools for scientific and research purposes, and he has worked in diverse data-driven industries, from IoT (Internet of things) to Healthcare.

Ricardo Esteban Martinez Osorio is a full stack developer working on the Open Targets Platform.

Javier is joined the team in 2024 as a Backend Software Developer. He now leads the Backend team.

Jack has a background is in mathematics (BSc) and computational biology (MPhil). His PhD project was focused on the functional genomics of Rheumatoid arthritis, exploring cell-type specific functions underlying existing GWAS associations.

As a statistical geneticist in the Open Targets Platform’s genetic analysis team, Jack currently focuses on developing and integrating tissue enrichment analysis for all publicly available GWAS.

James joined Open Targets in 2023 as a software developer working in the back-end team. He previously worked in the Samples, phenotypes, and ontologies team at EMBL-EBI.

Vivien is a bioinformatician in the Open Targets data team. She joined the team in July 2024.

Irene is a bioinformatician in the Open Targets Platform data team. She joined the team in 2020.

Graham McNeill is a web developer in the Open Targets front-end team. He joined in 2024.

David Ochoa is the Platform and Informatics Science Coordinator. He joined Open Targets in 2019.

David is involved in setting the scientific strategy for the Open Targets Platform and related projects, day to day management of core database projects - including the team that generates the Platform - and setting priorities in line with agreed strategy together with Project Management.

Prior to joining Open Targets, David obtained his PhD while using computational methods and network biology for predicting protein-protein interactions. After graduating, he joined as a postdoctoral fellow the group of Pedro Beltrao at EMBL-EBI to better understand human signalling under perturbation and disease by leveraging the growing body of large-scale proteomics data and the latest computational approaches in data analysis and machine learning.

With a background in Pharmacology and Bioinformatics, David has been working in web and mobile apps development for the last 5 years. He joined the Open Targets Platform front-end team in 2025. As part of this role, he helps to lead the Front-End team tasks and maintain Open Targets user interfaces.

Daniel obtained a PhD in structural biochemistry from Eötvös Loránd University, studying charged single alpha helices, a protein structural motif, using various biophysical methods.

Following this, he undertook postgradual work at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco. While at UCSF, he studied the HER family of receptor tyrosine kinases that play critical roles in cancer development, establishing an experimental in vitro system to study structure-function relationships of these proteins.

He has been working as a Senior Bioinformatician on the Wellcome Genome Campus since 2015, first within the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Analytical Genomics of Complex Traits research group, then in EMBL-EBI’s GWAS Catalog developr team.

He now leads the data team at Open Targets, who develop and maintain the data processing and integration pipelines, and actively develop our data models to ensure Open Targets’ informatics tools provide the most relevant answers to our users.

Szymon studied at Lodz University of Technology (BEng). He started his professional carrier in Children’s Health Memorial Institute in Warsaw where he was working on the rare diseases treatment in Polish population.

Since 2021 he worked as a software developer and bioinformatician in multiple start-ups focused on drug target discovery, whole genome sequencing and clinical trials validation. As a bioinformatician his work involved looking over the connections between co-linked gene mutations and providing predictions on gene functionality.

As a senior computational biologist within the Open Targets Platform’s genetic analysis team, Szymon supports and leads the development and implementation of the genetics pipelines for drug discovery and target prioritisation.

Yakov obtained his PhD in Statistical Genetics from Novosibirsk State University. He worked on the developing approaches for studying non-additive models and applied them to study the genetics of human metabolome.

In 2018, Yakov became a group lead in the Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS. His research focus was the development of new multivariate approaches and rare variant analysis approaches and its application to study the genetics of human lifespan, back pain and varicose veins.

Yakov joined Open Targets in 2022 as a senior statistical geneticist in the Open Targets core team to integrate novel genetic approaches for better prediction of drug targets. He became Genetic Analysis team leader in 2023.

Megan Bennett provides EA support to Gosia Trynka and her team, across both Human Genetics and Open Targets. She sits within the Operations Team in both programmes, providing administrative support to underpin operational flow.

Helena Cornu is responsible for all communications involving Open Targets. This includes our social media, blog, newsletters, and press releases.

With a degree from the University of Edinburgh, Helena’s background is in biomedical sciences, and has previous experience in science journalism and podcasting.

Jess is a Senior Research Manager at Open Targets. She joined the team in June 2024 from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she worked as a Research Manager in the Cellular Genetics programme.

Aadam is the part-time Data Manager at Open Targets covering for Sarah whilst on maternity leave. Aadam is also a part-time Data Scientist within Sanger’s CASM Operations team, which is where he completed his degree in Digital and Technology Solutions as a Service Desk and Software Developer Apprentice.

Paris is the Open Targets Senior Administrator and provides day-to-day support to our Executive Leadership Team.

Paris has over 10 years experience working as an administrator and has worked on the Wellcome Genome campus for the past 7 years learning lots about the way of working within both Sanger and EBI.

Sarah is the Open Targets Data Manager and joined the team in July 2021.

Prior to joining the Open Targets team, Sarah worked as a Case Investigator with Texas A&M Health Science Center on a COVID-19 contact tracing project and completed a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology with a concentration in genomics and bioinformatics.