Roser Vento-Tormo

Dr. Roser Vento-Tormo is a Group Leader and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Sanger Institute with an affiliated position at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute. Her research integrates genomics, computational biology, and artificial intelligence to study transcriptional regulatory circuits in dynamic biological systems, with particular focus on women's health and early life development.

Dr. Vento-Tormo's research interests center on understanding how signals from the tissue microenvironment rewire transcriptional regulatory circuits. Her lab has a dual focus: on the female reproductive system (a dynamic environment influenced by hormonal cycles, tissue-resident immune cells, and age-related changes) and on development and early life (particularly reproductive tissues during pregnancy and embryonic development). She investigates conditions such as endometriosis (which affects approximately 10% of individuals born with a uterus) and aggressive ovarian cancers, recognizing the significant global health burden of reproductive disorders.

Her research follows an innovative iterative framework: Profile (using single-cell multiomics to map multiple regulatory layers within cells), Predict (applying bioinformatics and AI to integrate data layers and generate biological interpretations), and Perturb (validating predictions through in vitro models and large-scale perturbations). This approach allows her team to integrate experimental data with human datasets, refining computational models and improving predictive accuracy.

Dr. Vento-Tormo leads a vibrant research group consisting of postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, bioinformaticians, and technical specialists. Her lab has developed significant resources including CellPhoneDB (a repository of curated receptors, ligands, and their interactions) and various cell atlases that explore expression patterns across time and space. Her team also created Gynaware, a pioneering educational resource that distills peer-reviewed science about female reproductive health into accessible illustrations and text.

Her leadership extends to mentoring numerous students and postdocs, many of whom have gone on to establish their own successful research careers at institutions including Harvard Medical School, Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Yale University. Dr. Vento-Tormo actively recruits new talent to her lab, emphasizing collaborative learning between experimental and computational approaches within the dynamic environment of the Wellcome Genome Campus.