Roser Vento-Tormo

Group leader

Roser leads a research team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

My interest is in decoding the principles of tissue organisation by developing and integrating tools in spatial genomics, artificial intelligence and gene editing to make tissue biology quantifiable and predictable. I am fascinated by how hormones shape cellular and tissue physiology both in female reproductive organs and other systems.

After completing my PhD at the University of Barcelona, I joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute as an EMBO/HFSP postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Sarah Teichmann. In 2019 I started my own group at the Sanger, dissecting the physiology of the poorly understood reproductive tissues across the lifespan. The cellular atlases of the female reproductive tissues generated by my team and released through the Human Cell Atlas are now widely across the field and have underpinned a series of fundamental discoveries. My team identified previously unknown progenitors in reproductive tissues, including two epithelial progenitors that act in coordination to heal the endometrium (the mucosal lining of the uterus) after menstruation. My team also showed that immune cells actively shape reproductive tissues and contribute to their regeneration, rather than acting as simple guardians

Central to these discoveries are the tools my lab builds. A key innovation has been the use of cellular atlases as blueprints for engineering in vitro models: my team was the first to establish a robust, feeder-free protocol for deriving human B cell progenitors (the cells that produce antibodies) from human induced pluripotent stem cells. B cells are essential to tissue physiology and play a central role in reproductive and inflammatory conditions.

With these tools in hand and with spatial multimodal measurement and AI advancing rapidly, I am excited about what now comes into reach: multi-scale, context-resolved causal models of human tissues, and with them a mechanistic basis for diagnosing and treating disease.

My timeline

• Global Adjunct Principal Investigator at AITHYRA

• Appointed Group Leader in the Cellular Genetics programme

• Awarded HFSP Long-Term Fellowship

• Awarded EMBO long-term Postdoctoral Fellowship

• Joined Sarah Teichmann's research group as a Postdoctoral Fellow

• Awarded PhD in Biomedicine

• Received MSc in Biomedical Technology

• Awarded PFIS Predoctoral Fellowship