The Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) offered through bioinformatics.ca focuses on training in leading technologies and the latest methods being used in computational biology to work with these data.
These include high-throughput sequencing data, protein-protein interaction data, metabolomics, epigenomics data and all the visual, statistical and command-line tools necessary to perform bioinformatics work.
Our Impact at a Glance
CBW’s leadership, faculty and students from across Canada have accomplished measurable advances in knowledge, advancing the field of bioinformatics.
CBW has been teaching Bioinformatics for more than 20 years
CBW has taught over 200+ workshops
CBW has taught 4000+ students
CBW has offered all its material open for reuse free of charge
Our Team
The team acts as the leadership and communication hub for CBW, and is responsible for supporting and coordinating education activities to achieve the CBW’s goals and objectives.
Scientific Director
Program Manager
Our Education Advisory Board Committee
Each committee member brings expert knowledge and experience, which is critical to the success of CBW as it provides a link to the broader research and training environments that enable maintenance of CBW’s currency and sustainability.
Founder and Retired Scientific Director
B.F. Francis Ouellette is currently consulting in bioinformatics. Francis co-founded the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) and the Scientific Director of bioinformatics.ca from 1998 to 2022. His research interests included biological sequence analysis, genome annotation and database curation. Francis has dedicated his career to Open Science: the data it generates, how bioinformatics is thought and the publications that report them throughout his career and through his work with the CBW and the many scientific advisory and editorial boards he serves on.
Biologist-Bioinformatician, rOpenSci
Stefanie Butland is a biologist-bioinformatician, knowledge-sharer, people-connector and community builder who is motivated by enabling great research. Throughout her career she has been bringing people together at the interfaces of the life sciences, medicine and computational sciences. She is the Community Manager for the rOpenSci Project that aims to transform science by working creatively and proactively to build tools for and to promote data literacy, open science and reproducible research.
Associate Director, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Michelle Brazas is the Associate Director for Adaptive Oncology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), a program encompassing a wide variety of projects from imaging, informatics, genomics and diagnostic development. Previously, she was a Program Manager for bioinformatics.ca, and through ISCB, GOBLET and other endeavours has always been the strongest supporter of open bioinformatics training worldwide.
Associate Professor, Lead, Iowa State University, Critical Assessment of Function Annotations
Iddo Friedberg is an Associate Professor at the department of Veterinary Microbiology & Preventive Medicine at Iowa State University. He is interested in large scale analyses of protein sequence, structure and function connections, genome evolution, metagenome analysis and computational protein function prediction. I am leading CAFA, the Critical Assessment of Function Annotations, a global community effort to improve our ability to predict protein function from sequence.
Lead, Freiburg Galaxy Project
Björn Grüning is with the Bioinformatics Group at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, in Freiburg Germany, where he heads the Freiburg Galaxy Project. His contributions include several that feature reproducible and accessible research prominently, including the recent article “Enhancing pre-defined workflows with ad hoc analytics using Galaxy, Docker and Jupyter” (Grüning, et al, 2017). He is a prominent contributor to, and is a driving force in, the Galaxy community.
Biologist and Computer Scientist, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
Facilitating learning, lasting partnerships, knowledge management, training and education in scientific environments. Patricia M. Palagi is a biologist and computer scientist by training. In 1997 she joined the Molecular Imaging and Bioinformatics Laboratory in Geneva, one of the 5 pillar laboratories of what would become the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics one year later. From then on, she coordinated and managed several MSc programs related to bioinformatics, in Geneva and Lausanne. Today she leads the SIB Training Group and my team coordinates training activities within the institute, with Swiss and international partners.
Bioinformatics.ca is proud to be a member of GOBLET: the Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education & Training and an ISCB Affiliate Group.