Ian Dunham

Since 2014, when it launched as CTTV, Ian Dunham has been the Scientific Director of Open Targets. He has played a key role in setting up and running a diverse portfolio of drug target centred research, and also leads the group that develops www.targetvalidation.org. He has been at EMBL-EBI since 2007 where he earlier managed the ENCODE project data analysis centre, and led the Ensembl Regulation team. Working closely with Ewan Birney, his interests included include experimental and computational approaches to genome-wide mapping of regulatory elements and chromatin state, and understanding the influence of variation on regulatory elements in human and other organisms.
In the past, Ian has been involved in genomics since around the time the term was coined. He obtained his D. Phil from Oxford University in 1989, determining the long-range structure of the human MHC. During his postdoctoral studies he worked with the genomic pioneer Maynard Olson in St Louis, before returning to the UK to construct a physical map of human chromosome 22. At the Sanger Centre from 1993 his work focussed 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 developed initial chromatin state maps of the genome as part of the NHGRI ENCODE project.