Experts
Dr. Paul Pavlidis is a Professor of Psychiatry and in the Michael Smith Laboratories at UBC. His lab’s primary research focus is understanding the molecular basis of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders using computational and bioinformatics methods to analyze genomics data. Dr. Pavlidis obtained his BA in biochemistry from Cornell University and did his PhD on neurogenetics and neurophysiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He did postdoctoral work on the molecular basis of synaptic plasticity in rodents before shifting focus to computational biology and genomics. He was on the faculty of Columbia University’s department of Biomedical Informatics prior to moving to UBC, where he has been since 2006. Dr. Pavlidis has a long track record of computational method and tool development in functional genomics, especially in transcriptomics and gene network analysis, and frequently collaborates with basic and clinical researchers.
Dr. Stothard’s research group uses bioinformatics, whole-genome sequencing and other genomics technologies to identify causative or informative sequence variants that can be used to improve animal breeding, management, and conservation approaches. His group has also developed and maintains several popular tools for characterizing and visualizing microbial genomes.
Qian Lin is a systems neuroscientist who studies the neural computation of cognition, by whole-brain single-neuron recordings in behaving zebrafish. Before joining UofT, she was a Leon Levy postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in NYC and Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Austria. She got her Bachelor at the University of Science and Technology of China, and PhD at National University of Singapore.
Our research traverses from genomes to small molecules integrating systems, structural and computational pharmacology as well as chemo- and bioinformatics. Our work is divided into four interconnected but independent axes within which we combine the development and use of innovative computational methods with experimentally validation. Namely: 1. The reconstruction and simulation of metabolic networks; 2. The detection of binding-site structural similarities; 3. Simulation of dynamic aspects of protein function; and 4. The development of docking algorithms.
Roger C. Levesque is professor of Microbiology at Université Laval. He obtained a B.Sc. in Biology at the Univ. of Moncton, M.Sc. in microbiology at the Univ. de Montréal and PhD in microbiology at Univ. Laval. His postdoctoral was at Harvard with George Jacoby in bacterial genetics, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in genetics, genomics and mutagenesis with Michael Smith (Nobel 1993) at UBC. He is the founder of the Institut de biologie intégrative et des systèmes (IBIS) at Univ. Laval, and was director 2009-2016. He is the scientific director of the FRQS Respiratory Health Network. He was awarded several FRSQ scholarships and Scholar of Exceptional Merit. He received the Robbie Award from CF Canada, the Univ. of Moncton Senior Science Award, an investigator award from the ASM, and was president of the Canadian Society for Microbiologists. He was co-founding member with 6 scientists of the Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network CBDN. His research is systems biology of virulence, antibiotic resistance and genome evolution.
Russ Greiner worked in both academic and industrial research before settling at the University of Alberta, where he is now a Professor in Computing Science (Adjunct in Psychiatry) and the founding Scientific Director of the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the AAAI, was awarded a McCalla Professorship and a Killam Annual Professorship; received a 2020 FGSR Great Supervisor Award and in 2021, received the CAIAC Lifetime Achievement Award and became a CIFAR AI Chair. In 2022, he received the (UofA) Precision Health Innovator Award, then in 2023, he received the CS-Can | Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award. For his mentoring, he received a 2020 FGSR Great Supervisor Award, then in 2023, the Killam Award for Excellence in Mentoring. He has published over 350 refereed papers, most in the areas of machine learning and recently medical informatics, including 6 that have been awarded Best Paper prizes.
Sébastien Lemieux, an associate professor at the biochemistry and molecular medicine department of U. de Montréal and an associate academic member at Mila, has a robust background in both biology and computer science. As a principal investigator at IRIC, his work focuses on the development of deep learning models and bayesian frameworks for drug discovery, cancer prognostic, -omics data integration with applications in acute myeloid leukemia and targeted immunotherapy. His interdisciplinary approach showcases his dedication to advancing the field of bioinformatics through a variety of data sources, technical methodologies, and applications.
Professor Abou Elela obtained his Ph.D. from University of Guelph in 1994 where he generated a system for studying ribosomal RNA processing in vivo and demonstrated the role of rRNA in translation. During his postdoctoral study at the University of California Santa Cruz he revealed the function of the first orthologue of eukaryotic RNase III and demonstrated its role in pre-rRNA processing. Prof. Abou Elela joined the Université de Sherbrooke in 1997 and became a member of the oncology group of the Centre de recherche clinique and the RNA group. Few years later he became the director of Sherbrooke laboratory of functional genomics, the scientific director of Genome Quebec RNomics platform, and the coordinator of the RiboClub. In 2013 Prof. Abou Elela became Canada Research Chair in RNA Biology and Cancer Genomics.
Recent work in Abou Elela lab demonstrated that RNA is a major source of cancer biomarkers and may predict tumour behaviour and drug resistance. His research has also indicated that messenger RNA is programmed to respond to cellular signals and degrades rapidly under exposure to drugs and other cellular stresses. Abou Elela aims to develop a model to explain how RNA production and degradation can influence cellular functions.
The Pai Lab at OICR analyzes high-throughput multi-omic data in the healthy developing and adult brain, and in pediatric and adult brain cancer, to identify diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for eventual clinical implementation. We work with data from genome sequencing technologies at single-cell resolution (e.g., scRNAseq) and bulk tissue (e.g., RNAseq, WGBS, EMseq, ChIPseq), with sample sizes ranging to cohort-scale. We specialize in understanding the role of the non-coding genome in disease progression.
Dr. Steven Hallam is a molecular biologist, microbial ecologist, entrepreneur, and innovator with over two decades of experience conducting field and laboratory research at disciplinary interfaces. He is a former Canada Research Chair in Environmental Genomics and current Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and program faculty member in the Bioinformatics and Genome Sciences and Technology training programs at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hallam is the founding director of the ECOSCOPE innovation ecosystem, founding co-director of the Biofactorial automation core facility in the Life Sciences Institute and co-director of the Bradshaw Research Institute for Minerals and Mining (BRIMM) Microbiome Theme. His research intersects microbial ecology, biological engineering, and bioinformatics with specific emphasis on the creation of functional screens and computational tools that reveal hidden metabolic powers of microorganisms at the individual, population, and community levels of biological organization.