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Instructors

Learn about our team of talented instructors.

Along with the CBW Leadership, the core faculty members are responsible for the ongoing curriculum development and the management of the CBW workshops.
The following is a list of the CBW core faculty, and past and present instructors and invited lecturers.

Current Faculty and Instructors
The focus of Dr. Langille’s research is to better understand human-microbial interactions and how that can be used to improve human health. This includes leveraging novel genomic technologies and developing improved bioinformatic methods to process and integrate multi-omic data to aid in biological interpretation. These discoveries will hopefully lead to novel applications for diagnosis, therapeutics, and precision medicine.
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.
My research aim is to develop and collaboratively apply data-driven methods to try and mitigate health and social crises. This is focused on two main areas: genomic epidemiology of infectious diseases and interdisciplinary health data science collaborations with experts in medicine and the social sciences.  My genomic epidemiology work involves creating novel microbial bioinformatics and machine learning approaches to better understand the diagnosis, evolution, and dynamics of infectious diseases.  This largely involves work with national and international public health consortia on problems related to antimicrobial resistance and, recently, the viral dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The broader health data science area of my work is more varied and tries to identify and solve the data-related problems of socially/health-focused academics, non-governmental organisations, and public health groups. This includes working with local shelters to identify gaps in provision, physicians to improve healthcare access among refugees, and sociologists exploring online radicalisation. I also actively support and contribute towards the MicroResearch initiative, a multinational community-based program focused on building research capacity in the Global South and under-served Canadian communities. I hold a jointly-appointed position in the Faculty of Computer Science and the Department of Community Health & Epidemiology (Faculty of Medicine), as well as an adjunct appointment in pathogenomics at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre’s Shared Hospital Laboratory.
The McArthur laboratory’s research program is rooted in bioinformatics, functional genomics, and computational biology. It spans complex informatics approaches to the functional genomics of microbial drug resistance, development of biological databases, next generation sequencing for genome assembly and molecular epidemiology, automated literature curation approaches, controlled vocabularies for biological knowledge integration, and functional genomics approaches in environmental toxicology. As part of our Cisco funded program, we additionally research the use and generation of ‘Big Data’ in the biomedical sciences, with the goal of integrating biomedical research and clinical healthcare.
Andrew McPherson is an Assistant Laboratory Member at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics under the supervision of Dr. Sohrab Shah. Andrew completed a PhD in computing science at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Dr. Cenk Sahinalp and Dr. Sohrab Shah, focusing on methods for sequencing analysis, including detection and characterization of genome rearrangements, and inference of clonal phylogenies. During his post-doctoral research at University of British Columbia with Dr. Sohrab Shah, Andrew focused on the development of computational methods and infrastructure for a novel single cell sequencing plaform, Direct Library Preparation. Andrew moved to MSKCC in May of 2019 and plans to build on his post-doctoral work in single cell genomics to understand genomic instability, mutational processes, clonal evolution and the role of the microenvironment in cancer development and progression.
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Division of Oncology, where my focus is on developing and applying computational tools to provide insight into the origins and progression of cancer. I earned Bachelor degrees in Biology and Computer Science from Truman State University and my PhD in Computational Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. My core research interests include understanding the clonal architecture of tumors and how they evolve in response to therapy, with a special focus on hematologic cancers. I also study effective design and targeting of cancer immunotherapies, developing open-source software for interpreting and visualizing genomic data, and integrative analysis that translates multi-dimensional genomic data into both functional and actionable contexts.
Gabriela is a MSc student in computer sciences at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Fanny Chevalier at the Dynamic Graphics Project, and Dr. Anna Goldenberg’s lab at SickKids Hospital. Her research is grounded in understanding human factors in the design of data- and data-visualization systems in healthcare. She has designed analytics interfaces in both industry and academic settings, and develops tooling in the form of R packages to increase understanding and ease of application of findings through interactive visualizations of the relationships between models and their clinical contexts.
Past Faculty and Instructors

Aaron Quinlan
Assistant Professor, Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia

Andreas Baxevanis
Director, Computational Genomics and Associate Director for Intramural Research, National Human Genome Research Institute, Bethesda, MD; Adjunct Professor, Johns Hopkins University

Anna Lapuk
Head Bioinformatics Scientist, Prostate Centre/Vancouver General Hospital

Axel Ducret
Sr. Research Biologist, Merck Frosst Center for Therapeutic Research

Carl Virtanen
Director, Research Lead UHN Digital, Associate Director, HPC4Health

Christina Yung
Vice President, Data Science at Indoc Research

Christopher Hogue

Daniel Figeys
Senior Scientist, MDS Ocata Inc.

David Baillie
Professor, Simon Fraser University

David Morais, PhD
Bioinformatician and software developer, Université de Sherbrooke

Donal Hickey
Professor, Biology, University of Ottawa

Fong Chun Chan
PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia

Fouad Yousif
Senior Data Scientist, Yelp

Franois Major
Professeur Agrégé/Associate Professor, Département d’Informatique et Recherche Opérationnelle, Université de Montréal

George Mihaiescu
Senior Cloud Architect, Informatics and Biocomputing, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research

Igor Jurisica
Senior Scientist, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, IBM Life Sciences Discovery Center

Jamie Cuticchia
Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto

Jennifer Bryan
Associate Professor, Department of Statistics and Michael Smith Laboratories, UBC

Joanne Fox
Instructor, University of British Columbia

John McPherson
Deputy Director, UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center

Joseph Ryan
National Human Genome Research Institute

Larry D. Greller
Director of Mathematical Biology and Systems Modeling, Molecular Mining Corporation

Marco Marra
BC Genome Sequencing Centre

Megan Richters
PhD candidate in Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Washington University School of Medicine

Michael Brudno
Chief Data Scientist, University Health Network

Michael Stromberg
Bioinformatics scientist, Illumina

Michelle Brazas
Associate Director, Adaptive Oncology, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research

Mike Hallett
Director, McGill Centre for Bioinformatics, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, Associate Member, Department of Biochemistry, McGill

Pascale Marquis
Bioinformatics Consultant, McGill University

Paul Boutros
Director of Cancer Data Science, UCLA

Peter Ronning
Graduate student, McDonnell Genome Institute, Washington University in St. Louis

Phil Hieter
Michael Smith Laboratories

Rachade Hmamouchi (Past Project Manager)

Raphael Gottardo
Associate Member, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Roberto Sanchez
Medical Biophysics, Rockefeller University

Ryan Brinkman
Senior Scientist, Terry Fox Laboratory, BC Cancer Research Centre

Sohrab Shah
Bioinformatics group leader, BC Cancer Agency

Stefanie Butland
Research Associate, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia

Steve Jones
Director of Data Analysis and Informatics Group, BC Genome Sequencing Centre

Steve Scherer
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

Walid Houry
Assistant Professor, Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto

Warren Gish
Associate Professor, Genetics, Washington University, St. Louis

Wyeth Wasserman
Professor, Department of Medical Genetics, Senior Scientist, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, University of British Columbia

Yoshua Bengio
Professeur Agrégé/Associate Professor, Département d’Informatique et Recherche Opérationnelle, Université de Montréal