DrSam Barnett

I am a Research Associate in the Noseda Lab at Imperial College London, where I use single-cell, spatial and multi-omics approaches to investigate cellular and molecular diversity in the human cardiovascular system.

My current research focuses on understanding how cardiac cell states vary across populations, including with age and sex, as well as across anatomical regions and disease. I am a key contributor to the Human Heart Cell Atlas, a large-scale community effort integrating single-nucleus transcriptomic and spatial datasets to build a population-scale reference of the human heart.

I completed my PhD at Imperial College London in 2024 under the supervision of Dr Michela Noseda and Professor Anna Randi. My doctoral research focused on the diversity of human vascular cells as part of the Human Cell Atlas initiative, leading to the development of a cross-organ atlas of the human vasculature published in Nature Medicine (Barnett SN, Cujba AM & Yang L et al., 2024). This work defined shared and organ-specific endothelial and mural cell states across the human body and provided a framework for investigating vascular specialisation. I also co-led a study of the human lung in COVID-19, integrating tissue histopathology with molecular and cellular profiling to identify pathways associated with severe disease outcomes, including dysregulation of coagulation, inflammation and fibrosis (Nature Communications, 2025; Lee JTH & Barnett SN et al.).

Prior to my PhD, I worked at the Wellcome Sanger Institute as part of a high-throughput facility specialising in the derivation and differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) for large-scale functional and genomic studies.