Saamin Cheema

PhD Student

Saamin is a PhD student whose research investigates somatic evolutionary dynamics and their contribution to disease and ageing.

I am a computational biologist interested in understanding how somatic cells evolve within tissues, and how these evolutionary dynamics contribute to disease and ageing. I use genomic and computational approaches to study somatic variation, revealing patterns of clonal evolution and the evolutionary histories of cell populations. My research spans two complementary contexts: disease associated with germline predisposition, where I investigate the early somatic evolution of cancer, and comparative studies across species with diverse lifespans, where I explore variation in clonal dynamics. By bringing together evolutionary genomics and comparative approaches, my work seeks to understand the role of somatic evolution in cancer development, tissue health and 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