Jobs

Dr. Pingzhao Hu in the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Computer Science at the Western University has a fully funded PhD student position in AI-guided drug discovery (phulab.org/positions). The successful candidate can register in Collaborative Specialization in Machine Learning in Health and Biomedical Sciences (uwo.ca/sci/datascience/graduate/collaborative-specialization-ml-health-biomedical.html) through the Department of Biochemistry.

Dr. Hu holds the position of Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Computational Approaches to Health Research. With extensive experience in mentoring trainees at various levels, many of Dr. Hu’s mentees have received international and national awards, secured positions in high-tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and reached the significant milestone of tenure-track assistant professor positions in Canada.

Ancient Sedimentary DNA Graduate Student

The Golding and Poinar labs are looking for a Master’s Student (MSc) to work on sedimentary DNA from ancient permafrost in the attempt to reconstruct past ecosystems to help better contextualize the causes and consequences of late Pleistocene extinctions as well as microbial ecology during major climate upheaval.

Funded PhD developing tools to automatically identify new and emerging antimicrobial resistance

The main aim of the PhD will be the development and evaluation of methods for automatically identifying novel and evolving antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes. AMR is a growing global health crisis that threatens the function of modern medicine.  Genomically informed diagnostics and surveillance have been identified as key activities to try and ameliorate this crisis. Currently, AMR gene prediction results (such those generated by CARD’s RGI) require a lot of expertise and manual analyses in order to identify potentially important or worrying emergent genes. This project seeks to use existing data from efforts to characterise AMR in large genome databases along with associated phylogenetic, spatiotemporal, and phenotypic data to develop means of automating these analyses.

The PhD will take place within the Maguire Lab in the Faculty Computer Science & Faculty of Medicine (Department of Community Health & Epidemiology) at Dalhousie University.  The specific PhD program (CS, Epidemiology, Interdisciplinary or potentially Microbiology/Biochemistry) will depend on the specific candidate background.    Through this research the candidate will gain skills in the analysis of large complex datasets, the development of bioinformatic tools and web resources, and translating genomic data into clinical and public health insights.

This project will also involve existing collaborations with clinicians (Toronto’s Shared Hospital Laboratory and Sunnybrook Research Institute), public health agencies (PHAC/NML & CFIA/NCFAD), and infectious disease researchers including local experts in evolutionary microbiology and Dr. Andrew McArthur’s Comprehensive Antibiotic Resistance Database (card.mcmaster.ca) group at McMaster University.

The Verschoor laboratory is looking for a prospective PhD student to investigate the utility of epigenome-wide DNA methylation patterns as a tool to understand and define the risk of acute and long-term health outcomes. Current areas of interest include: 1) the epigenomic basis of chronic inflammation and its relation to health trajectories in older adults, and 2) the oral methylome as an indicator of treatment-related complications and survivorship in head and neck cancer patients. Our laboratory in situated at the Health Sciences North Research Institute in Sudbury, Ontario (hsnri.ca) and is affiliated with the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University (nosm.ca) and the School of Natural Sciences at Laurentian University (laurentian.ca/school/natural-sciences).