Dr Hana Aliee appointed as a Junior Group Leader

Dr Hana Aliee joins the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute as a Junior Group Leader, starting in July 2025.

She will lead a research group focused on the development of artificial intelligence (AI) models to better understand the molecular mechanisms driving health and disease. She joins us from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she has been a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow in the Vento-Tormo lab. Her recent research uses generative modelling and causal machine learning to capture cellular changes and predict how individual cells respond to different disease contexts.

At the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, Dr Aliee will lead her team to develop new methods that uncover how gene expression and cellular behaviour change across environments, individuals, and disease states, advancing more personalised and inclusive healthcare solutions. Her team aims to build AI models that can discover what makes cells respond to drugs or genetic mutations.

Ultimately, they aim to be able to ask the model challenging “what if” questions like “What would happen if we could fix a faulty gene in a cancer cell? Would that cell return to a healthy state?”. Current tools are not yet good enough at answering these questions, so developing new methods could open the door to entirely new ways of understanding and treating cancer.

Dr Aliee completed her PhD in Computer Science at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and has since trained at Helmholtz Munich, with a research visit to the Mila Institute in Montreal.

Vacancies

The Aliee Group is seeking a Research Associate. For details about this role and how to apply, please follow the link below.