Dr Sailem is a Senior Lecturer and group head at the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King's College London. Her research is focused on understanding the interplay between genetic and phenotypic components underlying changes in tissue architecture in cancer. Understanding these components can open new avenues in cancer prevention and treatment. To achieve that she develops statistical and deep learning methodologies for analysing large biomedical datasets with a focus on imaging, digital pathology and multiplexing technologies.

Before joining King's, she was a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Oxford where she pioneered the concept of knowledge-driven machine learning. The only way we can harness the power of big biomedical data is through the development of intelligent systems that systematically incorporate existing biological knowledge. Such systems can guide machine learning approaches to discover new patterns in such rich datasets. She demonstrated the utility of this approach in functionalising cancer genes.

She did her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. While at the ICR she developed methods for integrating phenotypic data with gene expression, modelling of the relationship between cell signalling and its context, and modelling the dynamics of cell morphogenesis. In these studies, she discovered new links between cell shape and breast cancer progression.