Instructors

Aaron Petkau is a bioinformatician working for the Public Health Agency of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the current Head of Bioinformatics Pipeline Development within the Bioinformatics unit of the laboratory. His work primarily focuses on the development of bioinformatics software for infectious disease genomics. Some of his projects have included: developing tools for comparative genomics (GView and GView Server), phylogenetic analysis of microbial genomes (SNVPhyl), the management of genomics data (IRIDA), and indexing, querying, and visualization of mutations or genes derived from collections of microbial genomes (Genomics Data Index). He is currently focused on the development and integration of a diverse set of bioinformatics pipelines into a larger system for routine use within the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Dr. Gary Van Domselaar, PhD (University of Alberta, 2003) is the Chief of the Bioinformatics Laboratory at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg Canada, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Van Domselaar’s lab combines novel analytical systems and advanced visualization systems to research and control disease. His work incorporates metagenomics, infectious disease genomic epidemiology, genome annotation, bacterial population structure analysis, and genome wide association studies to understand and respond to infectious disease threats. His lab leads or co-leads several large scale national and international genomics and bioinformatics collaborations, including the Bioinformatics Workgroup of the Canadian Genomics Research and Development Initiative Interdepartmental Project on Antimicrobial Resistance, and the Genome Canada Integrated Rapid Infectious Disease Analysis (IRIDA) project to develop an integrated computational platform for infectious disease outbreak investigations. Dr. Van Domselaar  serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory groups including the Office of Infectious Diseases, US Centers for Disease Control, the Global Coalition for Science and Regulatory Research, the GenEpiO International Consortium, and the Canadian Public Health Laboratory Network.