Our Team
The whole is much more than the sum of it’s part. Meet our team!
Dr Alessandra Vigilante
Network lead KCL
Alessandra is a Reader in Bioinformatics at KCL. Group leader and head of the Hub for Applied Bioinformatics (HAB), her work sits at the intersection of bioinformatics, gene regulation, and spatial biology. She oversees the integration of spatial transcriptomics into both research and clinical workflows at KCL, collaborating with the Spatial Biology Facility, the SMART Trial Hub, and the Clinical Diagnostics Development Unit. She brings the network leadership, standards-setting experience, and institutional reach to turn SpatiaLondon from a conversation into a community.
Dr Anthony Baptista
Network co-Lead KCL
Anthony is a bioinformatician in KCL’s Cancer School and the lead developer of MOSAIK, the network’s open-source, containerised toolkit for QC, processing, and analysis of spatial omics data across Xenium, CosMx, and Visium HD. His work sits at the frontier of FAIR-ready spatial data handover and reproducible pipeline design, and he brings the technical backbone of SpatiaLondon’s methods and standards work.
Dr María del Pilar Acedo Núñez
Network co-lead UCL
Pilar is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL’s Institute for Liver and Digestive Health and academic lead of the UCL Spatial Biology Hub. Her research applies spatial omics to understand tissue organisation in liver and gut disease, giving SpatiaLondon direct connection to clinical and translational spatial biology. She brings expertise in multi-tissue spatial datasets and cross-institutional coordination across UCL’s broad research community.
Dr Nik Matthews
NETWORK co-lead IMPERIAL
Nik heads the BRC Genomics Facility at Imperial, one of London’s leading spatial genomics infrastructure hubs. With hands-on expertise running large-scale spatial transcriptomics experiments across multiple platforms, Nik brings a platform engineer’s perspective to the network, ensuring that the standards and methods SpatiaLondon develops are grounded in the realities of facility operations and data production.
Francesca Ciccarelli
Network co-lead CRick/QMUL
Francesca leads a research group at the Crick and QMUL focused on cancer genomics and tumour evolution. Her integration of spatial transcriptomics into cancer research brings a clinically relevant, multi-omics perspective to SpatiaLondon, connecting the network’s methods and standards work to the cutting edge of spatial biology in oncology, and anchoring the network’s presence at one of Europe’s foremost biomedical research institutes.
Ines Sequeira
Network co-lead QMUL
Dr Ines Sequeira is a Reader at Queen Mary University of London, where her research focuses on epithelial and stem cell biology, tissue regeneration and disease. Her group uses advanced spatial and single-cell approaches to investigate cellular heterogeneity and cell–cell interactions within complex tissues. She contributes to SpatiaLondon by helping connect researchers and expertise across the growing spatial biology community.
HAB staff
Network LEAD
Dr Gopal Krishna Ramadas Dhondalay (Senior Bioinformatician – Spatial Biology expert)
Dr Flavia Flaviani (Senior Bioinformatician)
Dr Michelle Simon (Senior Bioinformatician)
Dr Sally Chang (teaching Fellow)