Instructors

Vicki is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto studying invasive species in the subarctic, from the tundra to the boreal forest, and the effect of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances on invasive species at high latitude. In addition to doing summer fieldwork and analyzing those data, she also teaches “Quantitative Methods in R for Biology”, a third-year undergrad statistics course, and has taught and assisted dozens of workshops to students with a wide range of coding and statistics knowledge.

Richard has been involved in the implementation and use of high-throughput sequencing analysis pipelines for genomic and transcriptome data sets. Currently, he is developing tools for the analysis of SARS-CoV-2.

My research interests are in next-generation sequencing technologies and pipelines and in better understanding genetic diseases such as cancer. I have a BSc in Cellular, Molecular and Microbial Biology from the University of Calgary and an MBinf (Bioinformatics) from the University of Guelph. I am currently completing my PhD at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Toronto.

Zhibin manages the two UHN clusters under HPC4Health, Compute Canada. He is also members of Compute Canada Bioinformatics team and scheduling team. He is responsible for project management, system administration, NGS data analysis at PMCC.

Dr John Parkinson is a computational biologist whose research interests focus on the impact of microbiota on human health. After completing his PhD at the University of Manchester, studying molecular self-assembly, John spent a year at the University of Manitoba investigating diatom morphogenesis. In 1997, John moved to Edinburgh where he applied computer models to study the evolution of complement control proteins with Dr Paul Barlow. With the emergence of high throughput sequencing, John then led the bioinformatics efforts associated with the parasitic nematode expressed sequence tag project, responsible for the processing and curation of sequence data from 30 species of parasitic nematodes. John was recruited to the Hospital for Sick Children in 2003 and was promoted to Senior Scientist in 2009. He holds cross-appointments in both the departments of Biochemsitry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto. Current lab interests center on the role of the microbiome in health and disease as well as the mechanisms that allow  pathogens and parasites to survive and persist in their human hosts.  Key to this research is the integration of computational systems biology analyses with comparative genomics to explore the evolution and operation of microbial pathways driving pathogenesis. Findings from our research programs are helping guide new strategies for therapeutic intervention.

I’m a biologist with a computational and statistical background, and an interest in advancing clinical decision-making from patient data (precision medicine). In January 2021, I started my research group at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.