Log in
Home
Log in

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
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.
Dr. Trevor Pugh is a Senior Investigator and the Director of Genomics at OICR. He leads the OICR Genomics program, which brings together the Princess Margaret Genomics Centre, OICR’s Genome Research Platform, Translational Genomics Laboratory and Genome Sequence Informatics teams under an integrated initiative to support basic, translational and clinical research.
I am a principal investigator of computational biology at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research (OICR) and associate professor at University of Toronto (UofT) at the departments of Medical Biophysics and Molecular Genetics. I completed a PhD in computer science at the University of Tartu in Estonia in 2010 and postdoctoral training at the Donnelly Centre (UofT) during 2011-2015. I started my lab at OICR and the faculty appointment in 2015. I am interested in computational biology, machine learning, and cancer research
Chaitra is a computational biologist with experience in software development. During her PhD, she applied mathematical modelling, network analysis and multi-omics integration to study complex diseases. She has contributed to open-source toolboxes (openCOBRA) and developed softwares (EFMviz & ComMet) to analyse genome-scale metabolic models. She currently works in the Bader lab’s MODiL team (Multi Omics Data Integration and Analysis) and with groups at PMCC, where she develops pipelines to analyse various omics data types and discover new drug targets in cancer.
Dr. Simpson develops algorithms and software for the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data. He is interested in de novo assembly, the detection of sequence variation in individuals, cancers and populations and the application of compressed data structures to large analysis problems. Dr. Simpson developed the ABYSS and SGA software packages.
Prior to joining OICR in 2006, Dr. Stein played an integral role in many large-scale data initiatives at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Genome Center. He led the development of the first physical clone map of the human genome, and ran the data coordinating centre and the data portal for the SNP Consortium and the HapMap Consortium. Dr. Stein has also led the creation and development of Wormbase, a community model organism database for C. elegans, and Reactome, which is now the largest open community database of biological reactions and pathways. At OICR, Dr. Stein has led several international cancer data sharing and research initiatives, including the creation and development of the data coordination centre for the International Cancer Genome Consortium and other related projects. He continues to collaborate with national and international partners to create and promote data sharing standards, protocols and implementations.
Boris Steipe was born in Munich, Germany where he graduated from the medical school of the Ludwig-Maximilians University in 1985. He joined Andreas Plückthun’s lab at the Gene Center of the University for his PhD thesis on the recombinant expression and structure determination of an immunoglobulin fragment. Subsequently, his interests turned to protein engineering, and he joined Robert Huber’s Department at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany in 1990. It was there that his “Canonical Sequence Approximation” – the hypothesis that sequence propensities can be used to predict stability changes in a very general way was first formulated. Steipe was appointed Research Fellow at the Gene Center of the University, in 1990 and where his group worked on the rational stabilisation of immunoglobulin domains, on sequence determinants of protein folding and on the interplay of the protein matrix with the fluorophore in Green Fluorescent Protein; he was awarded his Habilitation in Biochemistry at the Faculty for Chemistry and Pharmacy of the University in 2000, when he was appointed as lecturer. In 2001 Steipe moved to Toronto where he holds an appointment as associate professor in the Department for Biochemistry and the Department for Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto. His directed the University’s Specialist Program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from 2004 to 2019.
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