“I never planned my career to be where I am now”: Muzz Haniffa on riding pillion, seizing opportunities and her vision for the Cellular Genomics programme

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Imagine you are riding a moped and with every twist of the throttle, you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin, the cool whisper of the wind through the palm trees and the pulse of the street with bicycles, rickshaws, cars and people all around you. This is one of Muzz Haniffa’s favourite childhood memories – immersed in nature sitting on the back of a moped with her arms wrapped around her father on her journey home from school.

“I always felt very free because the air was coming towards me. I was right next to the environment. It was a sense of freedom.”

Flash forward to 2025 and Muzz is the newly appointed Head of the Cellular Genomics programme at the Sanger Institute, a Senior Group Leader in the programme, a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow, and Professor of Dermatology and Immunology at Newcastle University. But this busy lifestyle was not always the case for Muzz. She grew up on a tropical island called Penang, named after a palm tree, in Malaysia with her mother and father and three siblings.

Now, Muzz and her research group are pioneering the application of single-cell genomics technologies to understand the role of the immune system in tissue development, homeostasis, and the consequences of disease. Muzz’s interest in the inner workings of human cells was first forged when her mother would take her and her siblings to the British Council Malaysia library. Here, Muzz gravitated toward the science books, particularly the ones on outer space. Then, when Muzz saw the 1987 film Innerspace, which is about a Navy pilot who becomes miniaturised and travels around the human body, she was captivated. It made her realise that both inner and outer space are quite similar just at different microscopic levels. Despite this interest, Muzz admits she was never an individual who had her career mapped out.

Some of these early experiences led Muzz straight to the headteacher’s office. At school, although Muzz did well, she admits that on occasion she misbehaved. From crawling out of the classroom to cutting maps out of textbooks, Muzz laughs remembering how she somehow always managed to get in trouble. In her science classes, Muzz recalls how her science teacher often challenged her with the toughest questions, so much so that Muzz would jokingly try to hide under the table to avoid being asked.

But secondary school was a turning point. She attended a local boarding school in Malaysia for high-achieving students. Muzz lets out a chuckle as she recounts how she thought she did great in her eleven plus exams to get into the school but later found out her aunt lived next door to the person who did entrances. Nonetheless, this school exposed Muzz to greater opportunities, which she acknowledges was very different to her life in Penang.

Towards the end of her schooling Muzz did not do as well as she had hoped during her O-levels, which were later replaced by GCSEs. As a result, she did not qualify for the best scholarships. Instead, she worked hard on the UK A-level equivalent exams, which prepared her for the local university, Universiti Sains Malaysia. This university had an exchange program with five UK universities, and Muzz ended up getting a scholarship to study medicine at Cardiff University.

This was the first time Muzz had left Malaysia, and she jokes that she would practice putting her arm in the freezer to prepare herself for UK weather. Luckily, on the Thursday afternoon Muzz and I met, the weather was more fridge temperature. Despite her previous education being in Malay, Muzz had to quickly get used to schooling in English and learning new words – particularly the different types of winter clothing.

“There was no reference for me when I arrived in the UK. Time started at zero. People would talk about school exams or TV shows, and I had no idea. Student socialising was completely different to home. There are some things I still haven't completely absorbed.”

Muzz ended up doing really well during medical school, finishing top of her year. Her parents attended her graduation, and she had to warn them about standing up and expressing their pride too loudly during the ceremony. She then went on to do her junior doctor training at Addenbrooke's and Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, before specialising in dermatology at Newcastle Hospitals.

“Junior doctor training does stretch you. But it makes you learn how to communicate and maintain professional relationships. If a conversation is not going well, you can always ask someone in your team for a second opinion. Also, as a clinician you have to describe a patient’s clinical problem clearly, so I learnt how to be succinct. There are also many instances where you have to act quickly and be decisive, whether it is diagnosing or deciding on treatment. I think these are all really valuable lessons for when you are working as a principal investigator in research.”

When thinking about the future after her clinical speciality, Muzz knew that she wanted to do a PhD, but she and her husband also wanted to start trying for children. During her viva, Muzz was heavily pregnant and 48 hours after submitting her thesis to Newcastle University she had her first son.

“I remember having to print out about five hard copies of my PhD thesis. I went to collect them heavily pregnant and realised I couldn't carry them. I had to try call a friend to help me carry my thesis hard copies.”

Muzz’s PhD thesis focussed on the immune cells in the skin, cataloguing what different cells were present using very limited techniques. Now, to some extent, Muzz continues to catalogue cells, but with cutting-edge genomics technologies. Rather than just asking what is present, Muzz now answers questions about how these cells come together, how they function and what goes wrong in disease. While Muzz continues to enjoy the research side of her career, she also runs a clinic at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary once a week.

Following her PhD, Muzz applied for a Wellcome Intermediate Research Fellowship, where she worked at both Newcastle and overseas at A*STAR Singapore Immunology Network. During her fellowship, Muzz used microarray technology, which measures gene expression, to explore how immune cells in the skin compared between human and mouse. This allowed her and her collaborators to create the equivalent of a Rosetta Stone for cells, identifying which cell types in the mouse corresponded to which cell types in the human. These results were published in two papers in 2012 and 2014.

After this, Muzz then applied for a Senior Research Fellowship at Newcastle, where she decided to start her single cell journey. Muzz wanted to dissect the diversity of cells at the single cell level, which was not common at the time. However, Muzz stumbled upon a group at the Broad Institute who were conducting similar work, so she reached out to them to connect. From this, she met up with Broad Institute Member, Dr Alexandra-Chloé Villani, in a café in Boston, which Muzz described as “like a blind date”. They explained their work to each other and realised there was capacity to collaborate, which is what they ended up doing. The people at the Broad took Muzz under their wings. They trained her on how to run a single cell RNA sequencing method, called SMART-Seq2, to generate data in her lab. The collaboration led to the first application of single cell RNA sequencing to create an atlas of human blood dendritic cells and monocytes, both types of immune cells.

Because Muzz collaborated with this team on applying single cell genomics to human tissues, she was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), a global consortium to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells to transform our understanding of health and disease.

“I somehow serendipitously found myself at this meeting and everybody was questioning who I was and why I was there because I wasn’t part of one of the ‘prestigious’ universities. One person asked, ‘Do you even have the instruments to do single cell genomics?’”

Following this meeting, Muzz knew that the HCA was going to be an amazing opportunity and wanted to be a part of it: “I fundamentally believed in what it was going to achieve.”

At Newcastle University, Muzz had access to the Human Developmental Biology Resource (HDBR), a tissue bank to support developmental studies. With this in mind, Muzz pitched the idea that the HCA could also have a Developmental Cell Atlas to Professor Sarah Teichmann, co-founder of the HCA and former Head of Cellular Genetics at Sanger. Sarah loved it and the rest was history.

As part of her contribution, Muzz profiled all the tissues and organs that were relevant for blood cell formation and differentiation as well as peripheral tissues that had an active immune surveillance network, such as the skin. This research formed the basis for multiple HCA papers, including detailing how blood and immune cells are made in the yolk sac, foetal liver and eventually the bone marrow, which continues to perform this function into adulthood.

It then became a natural drift; Muzz’s leadership within the HCA research made her already a part of the Sanger Institute, which she officially joined as a Senior Group Leader in 2022.

“I wanted to be part of the HCA, and I thought the Cellular Genetics programme was amazing. I thought the scale and ambition of the projects were fantastic. And then I came here and did just that. I then somehow found myself Interim Head and now Head of Programme. I never had planned that far ahead. The key thing for me is to make the most and best of where you are and grab every opportunity that comes your way.”

Since joining Sanger, Muzz’s projects have spanned three key areas, using genomics to understand immunology, human development and inflammatory diseases, particularly of the skin. For example, her team recently published a single cell and spatial atlas of the prenatal skin. This atlas revealed that communication between non-immune and immune cells is critical for hair formation, scarless wound healing and formation of new blood vessels in the skin. They also created a ‘mini organ’ of the skin in a dish, known as an organoid, filled with hair. They compared the characteristics of this organoid with the prenatal skin and found that the organoid model more closely resembled prenatal skin than adult skin. These findings provided new molecular insights into how human skin is built and how hair follicles form, which could be informative for future therapeutic applications, such as hair regeneration and skin transplantation.

Alongside her research, Muzz recently shared her new vision for the rebranded Cellular Genomics programme at Sanger. As part of the HCA, researchers are profiling human cells, but we still do not know how these cells come together. Muzz wants to understand the design principles of these cells in space, time and context. This will enable us to decode and recode tissue ecosystems – understanding how they are formed during development, maintained in health, what happens when they are vulnerable to disease and what goes wrong in disease. This understanding will help us model and engineer tissue ecosystems in the lab.

To achieve this, Muzz explains three key components that will “turbo charge” the entire process. The first is to map the cells during development and disease using single cell and spatial omics techniques, which will provide them with information about individual cells and the context of these cells within a tissue. The second is to model the cells in a dish using an in vitro organoid model. They will induce perturbations, including genetic changes, which will then allow them to reproduce disease in a dish. The final component is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to learn from the in vivo map, and then predict and interpret what experiments need to be done. Once these experiments are conducted, the insights will then feedback into a virtuous loop. This means that they can be guided by AI to effectively explore the infinite space of how cells come together in different scenarios and ultimately, find treatment strategies that can then be used to target these interactions.

When reflecting upon her time at Sanger so far, Muzz notes how she values learning from and speaking to all people across the Institute. It is evident that she has had an impact on her peers over her time here simply from her favourite moment at the Institute:

“For me, it has been the realisation of how much people supported me and how they were rooting for me to become Head of Programme. I was very touched by how everyone cared. I felt the love and support.”

This environment of love and support has been an ongoing thread throughout Muzz’s life and career. One of her key inspirations was her grandmother who raised ten children and was the most loving and warm person.

“I felt very secure and loved. I felt that was very important growing up. She inspired me. In fact, my thesis is dedicated to her and my middle name is after her, Aisha.”

Muzz continues to have a supportive environment around her at home with both her sons recently helping her develop her vision for the programme. Despite the suggested phrases “hypercharge” and “under my rule” not making the final cut of her vision, Muzz still loves that they show an interest in her work.

“Being a working mother is always tricky, because you never feel you are good enough. There’s always some kind of guilt. This guilt is partly because of what society expects of mothers, and also the guilt that you're not there for your children. I do the best that I can, and I always tell myself that no one can ever be the perfect mother. But I try to make sure that my children know that I absolutely 100 per cent love them.”

Outside of her work, Muzz considers herself a “film buff”. Her favourite ever film is the 1999 comedy-drama, All About My Mother. But upon further digging, Muzz admits her go to film is the 1999 Action/Sci-fi, The Matrix. From speaking to Muzz, I get the feeling that much like the main character, Neo, she would be ready to uncover the truth behind tissue ecosystems in health and disease and tackle all the challenges that come with it. But most importantly, willing to break free from traditions. This is something Muzz applies to both work and at home when she cooks.

“I like to see how I can substitute ingredients. I never follow recipes. I understand the concept and then play around with it. I don't think I'm very good at molecular biology, because you have to be very accurate. I much prefer messing around.”

While Muzz has a new life here in the UK, she still has a taste of home when cooking her mother’s famous chicken curry with an unusual hint of mint. When reflecting on her life now compared to back in Penang, Muzz finds it surreal how much everything has changed.

“If I look back on it, I wonder what my life would be like if certain events didn't happen. Sometimes I feel like pinching myself just thinking about how my life has changed compared to my childhood.”

Despite challenges along the way, Muzz has continued to embrace the opportunities presented to her, something which she encourages other inspiring scientists to do.

Muzz is certainly doing things differently here at the Sanger Institute with her 10-year vision just announced. This bold proposal, that is our favourite kind of ambitious, will not only embrace the opportunities that new genomics technologies and AI can provide but will be based on a research culture to empower our scientists to propel discovery science towards societal impact. This vision will be a challenging yet exciting adventure into tissue ecosystems, with Muzz at the helm – I think the Navy pilot from Innerspace would be captivated by her.