Instructors

Learn about our team of talented instructors.

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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

Quaid Morris

Our lab uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to do biomedical research, focusing on cancer evolution, gene regulation, clinical informatics, and gene function prediction. A key interest is the role of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) in post-transcriptional regulation. We focus on developing computational and experimental techniques to determine the RNA specificities of RBPs (both sequence and structural) and use these specificities to predict their target transcripts, determine RBP function, and ultimately decipher the regulatory code. Another focus is reconstructing and modelling somatic evolution (pre- and post-cancer) using bulk and single-cell genomic data. In general, we are focused on using large, heterogeneous functional genomic datasets to uncover insights about gene function. Recently, we have becoming increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, along with electronic medical records, to inform patient care, particularly in the domain of auto-immune disease.

Sorana Morrissy

Dr. Sorana Morrissy completed her PhD in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, under the supervision of Dr. Marco Marra. She pursued post-doctoral research in translational genomics in Dr. Michael Taylor’s lab at the Hospital of Sick Children in Toronto, ON. Throughout her training she gained extensive experience with cutting-edge high-throughput sequencing technologies and computational analyses in the field of cancer research, with a particular focus on understanding tumor heterogeneity and recurrent disease.

Sarah Mostafavi

I am an Associate Professor at the Paul Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of Washington (UW). Before joining UW, I was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics and the Department of Medical Genetics at University of British Columbia (UBC), and a faculty member at the Vector Institute. I also held a Canada Research Chair (CRC II) in Computational Biology (2015-2020), and a Canada CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence (CIFAR-AI). Before joining UBC, I did my postdoctoral fellowship with Daphne Koller at Stanford University. I got my PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2011, working with Quaid Morris. My PhD thesis was on integrating large-scale genomics and proteomics datasets to predict gene function. Check out GeneMANIA to find out more about this project!

Julia Nguyen

Ruiyan Ni

Shraddha Pai

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.

John Parkinson

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.

Aaron Petkau

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.

Allegra Petti

Her research is focused on understanding intratumoral heterogeneity, tumor evolution, and the tumor microenvironment at single cell resolution. She uses computational approaches to analyze, integrate, and interpret large-scale genomic data, with an emphasis on single-cell RNA-sequencing data. She completed a PhD in Genetics in the laboratory of George Church at Harvard Medical School, and a postdoctoral fellowship in Systems Biology with David Botstein at Princeton University. She was Research Faculty under the mentorship of Tim Ley at Washington University and the McDonnell Genome Institute.

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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