Davenport Lab

Emma Davenport

Group Leader

Emma focuses on integrating functional genomics and clinical data in order to understand how genetics contributes to the patient-to-patient heterogeneity in disease severity and treatment response. Emma completed her PhD research in 2014 under the supervision of Professor Julian Knight at the University of Oxford. In 2015, she joined Professor Soumya Raychaudhuri's lab at Harvard Medical School as a postdoctoral research fellow. Emma joined the Human Genetics Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in October 2018.
Katie Burnham

Senior Staff Scientist

Katie's work investigates variation in the host immune response and its potential relevance in clinical decision making and drug development. She is particularly interested in how the genetic background of a patient can impact their disease progression and response to treatment. Katie obtained her PhD in Clinical Medicine at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics in Professor Julian Knight's lab and joined the group as a postdoctoral fellow in 2019.
Wanseon Lee

Senior Staff Scientist

Wanseon’s work is focused on how transcriptomic profiles of genes in the human major histocompatibility complex (MHC) vary among different populations, diseases and individuals. She is also interested in the identification of genetic variants involved in the regulation of expression. She received her PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2010 under the supervision of Prof. Mewes. After her PhD, she carried out a broad range of high-throughput sequencing data analysis in the functional genomics group (Misha Kapushesky’s team) at the European Bioinformatics Institute (2010-2013) and in Julian Knight’s group at the University of Oxford (2013-2017). She joined the group as a senior staff scientist in 2019.
Niek de Klein

Postdoctoral Fellow

Niek is interested in the effects of genetic variants on gene expression in different cellular contexts, such as different tissues, cell types, or disease states. He focusses on single cell transcriptional effects in lupus patients. Previously, Niek was a PhD student in the group of Lude Franke at the University Medical Center Groningen, where he worked on genetic effects on gene expression in bulk blood and brain samples. He joined Emma’s group as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2020.
Alex Tokolyi

PhD Student

Alex is interested in how the immune response differs between individuals and circumstances, particularly in regard to factors of transcriptional variation (such as transcript splicing), and the relationship of this with pathogens and commensal microbes. After moving from Australia in 2019, Alex joined the 4-year Wellcome Trust PhD programme in Mathematical Genomics & Medicine at the University of Cambridge. In his first year of the programme, Alex performed a rotation project in the Davenport Lab in early 2020, and later joined the group to undertake his PhD.
Thomas Vanderstichele

PhD student

Thomas focuses on investigating how genetic variants and environmental factors influence the expression of immune-related genes to understand inter-individual variations in immune response. Thomas obtained a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford and conducted research for his dissertation in the lab of Professor Mona Singh at Princeton University’s Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics. He joined the group as a Ph.D. student in 2020.
Dhupal Patel

PhD student

Dhupal is interested in investigating the impact of host genetics on inter-individual variation in the response to acute infection and sepsis. Dhupal is currently on the Wellcome Trust Clinician PhD programme, and is a specialty registrar in anaesthesia and intensive care medicine at Addenbrookes Hospital.
Haerin Jang

PhD student

Haerin is interested in understanding heterogeneity in disease phenotypes and drug response. She focuses on discovering molecular processes occurring within and between immune cells in lupus patients through single cell transcriptomics. She completed her master’s in medical science in Korea and moved to Cambridge in 2021 as a PhD student at the Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge.
Phumrapee Boonklang

Masters student

Phumrapee’s work is on melioidosis, a neglected tropical disease with high mortality caused by the Gram negative bacterium B. pseudomallei, which affects people from low- to middle- income countries globally. He is interested in how host factors contribute to the variable disease outcomes, and will be focusing on analysing transcriptomic data. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Sciences from Newcastle University, and was working with Dr.Claire Chewapreecha in Thailand before joining the group in 2022.