Fellow

Sam Behjati is a Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. His unique contribution to science has been to use genomic data to reconstruct human development in a variety of settings, in particular addressing the question of the developmental origin of childhood cancer. He demonstrated the feasibility of reconstructing human development from somatic mutation barcodes that are acquired physiologically by dividing cells. He used this approach to make some remarkable discoveries, including the universal genetic isolation of the human placenta and organ-confined cancer predisposition. He has also developed methods and analytical approaches, some of which have become standard data processing tools, and has contributed widely utilised data sets of a variety of normal human tissues.