The Team

Prof. Mark Arends

Professor Arends directs the Centre for Comparative Pathology and leads the colorectal cancer pathology research group, working on both human samples and animal models of intestinal disease for cross-species comparisons.

Prof. Richard Baldock

Professor Baldock has led the Mouse Atlas programme at the IGC and developed the core concepts used by many spatial atlas resources internationally, including anatomy ontologies and the 3D spatial frameworks and techniques for spatial data mapping and visualisation.

Prof. Albert Burger

Professor Albert Burger leads the Biomedical Informatics Systems Engineering Lab (BISEL) at Heriot-Watt University. He has closely worked with the Mouse Atlas program for over 15 years. His research expertise focuses on distributed bioinformatics systems, including integration of distributed, heterogeneous databases and web service infrastructures.

Dr. Michael Glinka

Dr. Michael Glinka is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow investigating fibrotic stenosing lesions in Crohn’s Disease using single-cell RNA sequencing with histopathological analysis including immunohistochemistry and in-situ hybridisation. He graduated from the University of Bristol, studying Biochemistry and Biotechnology, and achieved a Degree of Philosophy in Medicine for investigating natural and synthetic materials used for targeted stem cell fate and function in skeletal repair.

Dr. Irene Papatheodorou

Dr. Irene Papatheodorou moved in February 2024 from EBI to become the Head of Data Science at the Earlham Institute (Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7UZ) to lead a group of skilled data-led scientists, focusing on: developing software and metadata standards for openly and reproducibly sharing different types of omics data and images; and decoding phenotypes using single-cell genomics.

Irene previously lead the Gene Expression team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) at Hinxton, Cambridge, which focuses on gene expression analyses at tissue and single cell level across species. Her team delivers tools and services for the submission, archiving, analysis and visualisation of functional genomics experiments.

Dr. David Adams

Dr. David Adams and his team at the Sanger Institute, investigates how genetic alterations contribute to cancer development and the genetic wiring of cancer cells using approaches such as CRISPR genome editing. This provides fundamental insights into how cancers develop and evolve and how genetic changes in cancer genomes may be used as targets for cancer therapy.

Mr Mike Wicks

Mr Mike Wicks is the Workbench Programmer for Prof. Arends in the Centre for Comparative Pathology, and has built the Comparative Pathology Workbench software system.

Dr. Shahida Din

Dr. Shahida Din is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at the Western General Hospital and a National Research Scotland Clinician leading clinical trials and a programme of work to improve the detection of colonic epithelial dysplasia/colorectal cancer in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases. She has been appointed to lead the Scottish working group on IBD Colonoscopy Surveillance Programme and is an elected member of the BSG IBD Committee and Gastroenterology specialty advisor to the RCPE.

Mr Derek Houghton

Derek Houghton is the Database and Application Developer for the Gut Cell Atlas Project.  He brings to the collaboration an experience history of working on various high profile medical research projects as both Data Architect and UI designer.

Mr Bernard Haggarty

Mr Bill Hill

Mr Bill Hill has recently worked on spatial bio-medical atlas systems including the e-Mouse Atlas Project, a 3D molecular atlas of the chick embryonic heart and spatial transcriptional mapping of the human nephrogenic program. He has particular interests in novel image registration and visualisation.