Ian Dunham

Ian Dunham became the Director of the innovative Open Targets Initiative in 2019. Before becoming director, Ian was the Scientific Director of Open Targets for five years and played a pivotal role in establishing the research programme, and the bioinformatic and experimental projects of the initiative. These include experimental projects in oncology, neurodegeneration, immunity and inflammation. Ian is a Faculty member at EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Ian's earlier research interests include experimental and computational approaches to genome-wide mapping of regulatory elements and chromatin state in the human genome as part of the NHGRI ENCODE project, as well as understanding the influence of variation on regulatory elements in human and other organisms, including leading the Ensembl Regulation team. He was previously a Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute from 1993, focusing first on genome sequencing including the first human chromosome sequence in 1999, and subsequently on developing functional maps of the human genome. This included gene structure maps, variation maps, and the first chromosome-wide linkage disequilibrium map. He also holds an Associate Faculty position at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.