Instructors
Professor Nil Basu holds a Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Environmental Health Sciences at McGill University where he is jointly appointed in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the School of Human Nutrition. Professor Basu also holds appointments in McGill’s School of the Environment and the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health, as well as an adjunct professorship at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. The goal of Professor Basu’s research is to design, validate, and apply innovative and sustainable approaches to address the most pressing societal concerns over toxic chemicals in our environment. Professor Basu’s research is multidisciplinary (bridges environmental quality and human health), inter-sectoral (most projects driven by stakeholder needs, notably government and communities), and driven by environmental justice concerns. Professor Basu has assumed national and international leadership positions to bring together diverse teams to tackle grand challenges in the field (e.g., chemicals management, mercury pollution, electronic waste). Professor Basu’s research activities are situated at the interface of science and policy with notable involvements with the UN Minamata Convention, Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan, and the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health. His team’s work has been supported by more than $40M in research funding, resulted in >200 peer-reviewed papers, and afforded training opportunities to over 100 students including 18 postdoctoral fellows and 12 PhD students.
Mark Phillips works in comparative privacy and data protection law, particularly where it intersects with health data sharing. His academic background is in law and computer science, and he is a practicing member of the Quebec Bar Association. He works at the Centre of Genomics and Policy at McGill University as an Academic Associate, and is the co-chair of the Data Protection Task Team of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health’s Research and Ethics Work Stream. His comparative legal research focuses on topics including cloud computing, the identifiability of personal data, bioinformatics, and open data.
His research focuses on statistics and bioinformatics for metabolomics, microarray and next generation sequencing (RNA-seq) data analysis and integration. Some of the tools he developed in the past include MetaboAnalyst for statistical analysis of metabolomics data, MSEA for metabolite set enrichment analysis, MetPA for metabolic pathway analysis, ROCCET for ROC curve based biomarker analysis, and NetworkAnalyst for data integration and network analysis. His general interest is high-throughput omics data analysis using a variety of statistics, machine learning and data visualization technologies.
After completing a postdoctoral position in Australia, Rob joins the team as a Bioinformatics consultant specializing in fungal/plant genetics and developing omics resources, strategies, and infrastructure for laboratories working with non-model organisms. He has more than a decade of experience working in genomics, and holds a PhD in bioinformatics from Curtin University.
Francis was one of the co-founders of the CBW in 1998. His teams were involved in the development of high throughput sequence analysis methods, as well as the development of platforms to integrate data from various open databases. Francis continues to be interested in computational biology and genomics, and the integration of all data types to help our understanding of biology.
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