Saamin Cheema

PhD Student

Saamin is a PhD student investigating DNA changes in our cells to understand how cell populations evolve within tissues over time, their contribution to disease, and their potential role in ageing.

I am a computational biologist interested in understanding somatic evolutionary dynamics and their role in disease and ageing. My PhD explores these questions thorugh two contexts: genetic predisposition to disease and variation across species. On one hand, I investigate the somatic mutational landscapes and evolutionary histories of precancerous lesions in hereditary diffuse gastric cancer, aiming to uncover the early evolutionary changes associated with genetic predisposition that contribute to cancer development. On the other, I characterise clonal dynamics across non-human primates, leveraging the remarkable diversity in lifespan across the primate order as a natural experiment to investigate how somatic evolution differs between short- and long-lived species, and what this may reveal about its potential role in ageing.

My timeline

• PhD Student, Rahbari Group, Wellcome Sanger Institue

• MScR in Cancer, University of Edinburgh

• Bioinformatician, Adams Group, Wellcome Sanger Institue

• Data Scientist, Stratton Group Wellcome Sanger Institute

• BSc in Biochemistry, UCL