Faculty

Under the direction of Francis Ouellette, CBW scientific director, the core faculty members are responsible for the ongoing curriculum development and the management of the CBW workshops. Beginning in 2008, the CBW is introducing a new series of 2-day workshops. The following is a list of the CBW core faculty, and past and present instructors and invited lecturers.

Core Faculty

Gary Bader Assistant Professor, Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research (CCBR), University of Toronto
Dr. Bader develops biological network analysis and pathway information resources, having created such resources as the Biomolecular Interation Network Database (BIND, http://bind.ca) while working on his PhD.

Michelle Brazas Manager Bioinformatic Education and Research Associate, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Dr. Brazas is involved in the development and implementation of advanced bioinformatics education programs for the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) series, as well as other outreach science education programs. In the Ouellette lab at the OICR, she is also involved in cancer genomics research.

Fiona Brinkman (CBW Core Faculty) Associate Professor, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Brinkman, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Scholar, is interested in the evolution of pathogenicity and the development of bioinformatic tools to predict new vaccine/drug targets for microbial pathogens.

Michael Brudno (Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Computatiuonal Biology, University of Toronto)
Dr. Brudno works on genome assembly and discovery of variation using Next Generation Sequencing data. He is also interested in development of bioinformatics tools and population genomics.

Stefanie Butland (CBW Founding Instructor) Research Associate, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia
In the Wasserman lab, Stefanie is developing a wiki-based Transcription Factor Encyclopedia that is integrated with the PAZAR database of transcription factor and regulatory sequence information. Her research has also involved extensive analysis of the sequences underlying trinucleotide repeat disorders. She is a co-founder and organizer of VanBUG, the Vancouver Bioinformatics User Group.

Joanne Fox (CBW Core Faculty) Instructor, Michael Smith Laboratories, University of British Columbia
Dr. Fox has interests in developing tools for teaching and learning bioinformatics. She is also involved in the implementation of various science education/communication programs at the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory (AMBL).

Raphael Gottardo (CBW Core Faculty) Director of the Computational Biology research unit at the IRCM.
His research focuses on the development of statistical methods and computational tools for interpreting high throughput biological data with applications to health research.

Mike Hallett (CBW Core Faculty) Director, McGill Centre for Bioinformatics, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Associate Member, Department of Biochemistry.
Dr. Hallett uses tools from statistics, statistical inference and algorithm design to address problems arising in biological and medical research. His research focuses on Breast Cancer, the Endoplasmic Reticulum interactome and trafficking diseases.

Francis Ouellette (CBW Founding Core Faculty and Scientific Coordinator) Senior Scientist and Associate Director of the Informatics and Biocomputing at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR).
Francis Ouellette’s team is involved in developing high throughput sequence analysis methods, as well as developing platforms to integrate data from clinical, genomic, proteomic and small molecule databases. Francis continues to be interested in protein-protein interaction databases and the integration of that data with other bioinformatics resources.

Sohrab Shah Bioinformatics group leader, Molecular Oncology and Centre for Translational and Applied Genomics, BC Cancer Agency.
Dr. Shah works on developing analytical methods for interpretation of next generation sequencing and other high dimensional genomic data from breast and ovarian cancer. His work is focused on profiling subtypes of breast and ovarian carcinoma to improve clinical management of these diseases and on discovery of novel genetic alterations. His previous work focused on probabilistic modeling of array comparative genomic hybridization data.

Boris Steipe (CBW Core Faculty) Associate Professor, Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, Director, Specialist Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Toronto
Dr. Steipe is active in structural bioinformatics and protein engineering. His research interests include the discovery of linear and non-linear motifs in protein structure and the application of these motifs to rational protein engineering.

Wyeth Wasserman (CBW Core Faculty) Professor, Department of Medical Genetics, Senior Scientist, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia
Dr. Wasserman develops algorithms for the analysis of regulatory sequences, with the goal of understanding how, when and where each gene will be expressed. His group creates community resources like the JASPAR and PAZAR databases.

David Wishart (CBW Founding Core Faculty) Professor, Depts of Computing Science and Biological Sciences, University of Alberta
Dr. Wishart is currently working in four areas: 1) Protein folding and protein structure prediction; 2) Automated genome/proteome annotation; 3) Developing software tools to facilitate metabolomics and cheminformatics; and 4) Developing software tools to improve NMR-based protein structure determination. More recently his research has moved towards systems biology and synthetic biology.

Invited Instructors/Lecturers:

David Baillie (Past Faculty) Professor, Simon Fraser University

Andreas Baxevanis (Past Faculty) Director, Computational Genomics and Associate Director for Intramural Research, National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD; Adjunct Professor, The Johns Hopkins University.

Yoshua Bengio (Past Faculty)Professeur Agrégé/Associate Professor, Département d'Informatique et Recherche Opérationnelle, Université de Montréal.

A. Jamie Cuticchia (Past Faculty) Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto

Axel Ducret (Past Faculty) Sr. Research Biologist, Merck Frosst Center for Therapeutic Research

Daniel Figeys (Past Faculty) Senior Scientist, MDS Ocata Inc.

Warren Gish (Past Faculty) Associate Professor, Genetics, Washington University, St. Louis

Larry D. Greller (Past Faculty) Director of Mathematical Biology and Systems Modeling, Molecular Mining Corporation, Kingston, Ontario

Donal Hickey (Past Faculty) Professor, Biology, University of Ottawa.

Phil Hieter (Past Faculty) Michael Smith Laboratories, Vancouver, BC

Christopher Hogue Assistant Professor, Bioinformatics Research, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Mt. Sinai Hospital, Toronto
Dr. Chris Hogue is a member of the Proteomics and Bioinformatics Research Group at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute. His team develops technologies, software, algorithms and databases for the discovery and prediction of domains and 3-dimensional structures from genomic sequence. In 2001, Dr. Hogue spent a sabbatical creating the 45 person Bioinformatics group at MDS Proteomics. Dr. Hogue was a GenBank/NSERC post doctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda, MD.

Walid Houry (Past Faculty) Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON.

Steve Jones (Past Faculty) BC Genome Sequencing Centre, Vancouver, BC
Dr. Steven Jones heads up the Genome Sequence Centre's Data Analysis and Informatics Group. Through advanced statistical techniques, this group is analyzing and managing the vast amounts of genetic information that is generated by the GSC. His research has focused on the bioinformation of the C. elegans genome, and Dr. Jones coordinates the efforts of CIG researchers to develop a complete library of C. elegans strains, in which each of the organism's 19,000 genes have been "knocked out."

Franois Major (Past Faculty) Professeur Agrégé/Associate Professor, Département d'Informatique et Recherche Opérationnelle, Université de Montréal
Dr. Major is a Principal Investigator with the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems and the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence. His team is interested in the structural and functional prediction of RNA and other macromolecules using a constraint satisfaction and graph-theorectic approaches. Dr. Major was a visiting fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, Bethesda. MD.

Marco Marra (Past Faculty) BC Genome Sequencing Centre, Vancouver, BC

Joseph Ryan (Past Faculty) National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD.

Roberto Sanchez (Past Faculty) Medical Biophysics, Rockefeller University, New York

Steve Scherer (Past Faculty) Senior Scientist, Department of Genetics and Associate Director, The Centre for Applied Genomics at The Hospital for Sick Children, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, Canada

Gary Van Domselaar (Past Faculty) Bioinformatics Scientist, Genetics Institute, Cambridge, MA.