David Osumi-sutherland
Principal Research Scientist at Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolDavid Osumi-Sutherland is a Principal Research Scientist and ontology leader with 15 years of expertise building scalable semantic solutions for biomedicine, especially for single-cell biology, atlasing and cross-species phenotype integration. A biologist by training with a PhD in developmental biology and a decade of bench research in developmental genetics, he translated deep domain knowledge into formal OWL ontologies that now underpin major resources like Virtual Fly Brain, the EBI Single Cell Atlas and parts of the Allen Cell Type Knowledge App. He manages the SPOT ontology team at EMBL-EBI and has driven contributions to core Open Biomedical Ontologies including the Cell Ontology, Uberon, Mondo and HPO, and tools such as the ontotools suite and the Experimental Factor Ontology. His work powers phenotype-to-disease integration for the Monarch Initiative and practical clinical tools like Exomiser, demonstrating rare fluency across research, curation and production-scale infrastructure. Known for turning loosely defined domain knowledge into machine-actionable semantics, he combines hands-on ontology engineering with collaborative program leadership across international consortia. Based in London, he bridges lab-born biological insight with rigorous semantic engineering to make complex biological data interoperable and queryable at scale.
15 years of coding experience
MSc Science Communication, MSc Science Communication at Imperial College LondonBSc (Hons) Biochemistry, BSc (Hons) Biochemistry at The University of SheffieldPhD Developmental Biology, PhD Developmental Biology at University of Warwick
Github Skills (200)
travis10
ontology10
semantic-web10
metadata10
transcriptomics10
odp10
owl10
genomics10
quantities10
data-repository10
genes10
ontologies10
semantics10
neo4j10
knowledge-graph10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
VirtualFlyBrain/VFB_neo_kb_2_owl
Jun 2017 - Jul 2020
Scala app that writes owl from VFB_neo_KB
Contributions:14 PRs, 73 pushes, 12 branches in 3 years 1 month
scalaneovfbowl
VirtualFlyBrain/VFB_connect
Jan 2020 - Mar 2022
A library for querying VFB servers (neo4j, owlery, solr)
Contributions:3 releases, 7 reviews, 178 commits in 2 years 2 months
solrqueryingvfbneo4jjava
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.