This latest announcement follows RDM's confirmation of five new RDM PIs, after the Department's annual call earlier this year.
Congratulations to:
Agne Antanaviciute is a computational biologist working in the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine within the Translational Immune Discovery Unit and Centre for Computational Biology. Agne obtained her PhD from the University of Leeds, where she developed new computational methods to study genetics of rare diseases. She joined the MRC WIMM in 2018, where she worked in Professor Alison Simmons' group as an Oxford-BMS (Bristol Myers Squibb) postdoctoral research fellow, bridging experimental and system immunology approaches to study inflammatory bowel disease.
Agne now leads an inter-disciplinary team focused on understanding immune cell behaviours and their tissue microenvironments in health and disease. She was recently awarded a Wellcome Career Development Award to unravel early-life intestinal immunity, build new computational tools and develop new large-scale data-driven models that will help us understand how life-long immune tolerance is established and how premature birth alters key regulatory transitions at the mucosal interface, leading to susceptibility to paediatric disease.
Mira is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher and has been working with Professor Doug Higgs in the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine since 2012. Mira completed her DPhil in Molecular Haematology at the MRC WIMM's Molecular Haematology Unit before joining the Higgs group where she focussed on the role of non-coding genome sequences such as enhancers (sequences that drive transcription of tissue and developmental genes from a distance) in gene regulation, using the alpha globin locus in erythropoiesis as a mammalian model locus.
Mira's research will further focus on how genes are switched on and off in development, differentiation and disease by studying the three fundamental non-coding cis-regulatory elements: enhancers, promoters and insulators and what characterises the DNA sequence underlying the function of these elements in mammalian genomes.
Sumana Sharma is a Wellcome Career Development Fellow based at MRC Translational Immune Discovery Unit (TIDU) in the MRC WIMM. She completed her PhD at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Professor Gavin Wright's laboratory, where she focused on CRISPR-screening approaches to identify low-affinity receptor-ligand interactions at the cell surface. Following this, she undertook a short postdoctoral position at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Evangelia Petsalaki's group, studying context-dependent signalling processes in cells.
In 2020, she joined Professor Simon Davis's group with a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, where she developed methods to study inhibitory receptor signalling processes in a high-throughput manner. In 2025, she was awarded the Wellcome Career Development Award. Her group now aims to optimise T cell function by systematically studying signalling pathways mediated by inhibitory receptors. They are particularly interested in discovering strategies to reengineer T cells for therapeutic applications, guided by a systems-level understanding of cellular signalling.
RDM's Designation Process for PIs
RDM operates an annual call inviting qualified researchers to apply for RDM PI status. Applications are reviewed by RDM's Academic Career Panel which will then make recommendations to RDM's Senior Leadership Team. In exceptional circumstances, the panel has the discretion to confer RDM PI status outside of the annual call.
You can find out more about the designation process for RDM PI status and the criteria on the Career Development webpages.