Team

Jon Teague is the Director of COSMIC. Jon uses his wealth of experience in delivering high quality IT solutions in the Bioinformatics and Genomics fields, to head the COSMIC team, driving our mission and strategy. Jon has a keen interest in the development of bioinformatic resources to interpret cancer genomic data, and making the data available for the benefit of the scientific research and healthcare communities and the pharmaceutical/biotech sector.

Before joining COSMIC, Jon joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute in 2000 where he set up the bioinformatics for the Cancer Genome Project. He was involved in the IT/Bioinformatics of the sequencing of the first two cancer whole genomes and the subsequent development of the algorithms and genomic analysis infrastructure to allow the scaling to thousands of samples. This led to a series of major scientific discoveries to include the identification of a number of cancer genes (including BRAF, PBRM1, CALR, SF3B1, COL2A1, UTX) and several novel mutational processes (chromothripsis and kataegis).

Additionally, as technical co-founder, Jon played a pivotal role in the creation and development of the COSMIC database in 2004.

Nidhi Bindal Dhir is the head of the COSMIC IT team. Nidhi uses her extensive experience and expertise in IT/Bioinformatics to manage and strategise COSMIC’s IT infrastructure.

Her strategy aims to make our Knowledgebase even more stable, secure and accessible for the scientific user community, to ultimately help human health. To achieve this, she leads a team of IT professionals with a vast range of expertise across bioinformatics, data engineering, web development and more.

Before joining COSMIC in 2009, Nidhi worked as a Research Assistant at Sheffield Hallam University, where she developed a graphical user interface for an automated colon cancer diagnostic system. With a background in IT and bioinformatics, Nidhi specialises in cancer diagnostic tools. She completed her MSc in Bioinformatics at Sheffield Hallam University in 2007.

Karen McLaren is the Head of Product and Delivery for COSMIC. Having joined the Sanger Institute in 1994, she has a successful track record of project delivery including entire laboratory migrations and software system implementations.

Karen began her time at the Sanger Institute working for Sir John Sulston on the C.elegans Genome Project and has been a part of many key genomic initiatives including the Human Genome Project and Zebrafish Genome Project. As COSMIC’s Head of Product and Delivery, Karen is responsible for further evolving the product management strategy and overseeing change delivery initiatives, combining her proven experience in project and product management with her extensive background in genomics.

Karen holds a joint honours degree from The University of Surrey, where she majored in Biology.

Sari Ward is the Head of Data Curation for the COSMIC team. An expert in somatic mutation profiles of cancer genes and the histological classification of solid tumours, Sari specialises in literature curation of somatic mutation data across all human cancers. 

As COSMIC’s Head of Data Curation, Sari leads the data curation direction, strategy, and activities of the COSMIC database. Her team consists of experienced scientific curators who focus on somatic mutation curation. The team also promotes the development of clinical metadata standards and the efficient sharing of published cancer genomics data.

Before joining COSMIC and the Sanger Institute in 2010, Sari worked at Pfizer Global R&D doing computational biology. Her background is in cell biology and cancer diagnostics. Sari holds an MPhil in Biochemistry from Turku University, Finland.

Daniel Zerbino is Head of Science and Innovation for COSMIC. As a leader in biological data sciences, Daniel brings 20 years’ experience and an extensive knowledge in genome-wide analysis of genomic and functional genomic datasets, across most molecular ‘omic types. 

He and his team oversee ongoing R&D efforts to modernise and strengthen the COSMIC Knowledgebase's technical infrastructure. 

Daniel’s mission is to align COSMIC’s future scientific and technological advancements with our market, while keeping COSMIC pertinent to users' evolving requirements.

Before joining COSMIC in 2026, Daniel led the Data Science team at Mosaic Therapeutics, a Wellcome Sanger Institute spin-off focused on cancer therapeutics. Prior to that, he was a group leader at EMBL-EBI, co-leading the Ensembl genome browser project. 

Daniel has a PhD in Bioinformatics from Cambridge University.