Experts
Mohamed is a computational systems biologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO). He obtained his undergraduate degree in Genetics from the School of Agriculture, Al-Azhar University (Cairo, Egypt) and a postgraduate diploma in Information Technology from the Information Technology Institute (ITI) (Giza, Egypt). Mohamed got his MSc and PhD degrees in Computational Systems Biology from Keio University (Tokyo, Japan). He completed his postdoctoral training in Bioinformatics at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan) and the School of Medicine, University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada).
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 and therapeutics.
Nadia Tahiri received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Quebec at Montreal. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sherbrooke. Her research interests include evolution, phylogenetic tree, clustering, classification, computational biology, and biogeography, and consensus tree/supertree.
Nicholas Provart is a professor of plant cyberinfrastructure and systems biology and is chair of the Department of Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Toronto. Currently his Bio-Analytic Resource (BAR) at bar.utoronto.ca, comprising tools for coexpression analysis of publicly-available gene expression data, cis-element prediction, identifying molecular markers, generating “electronic fluorescent pictographic” (eFP) representations of gene expression patterns, and exploring protein-protein interactions in Arabidopsis and other plants, receives 4M page views a month by researchers worldwide. He is one of the founding members of the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium, is president of the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee, and is teaching five MOOCs on bioinformatic methods, plant bioinformatics, and data visualization for genome biology on Coursera.org.
The goal of Professor Basu’s research is to design, validate, and apply innovative and sustainable approaches (focused on toxicogenomics) to address the most pressing societal concerns over toxic chemicals in our environment. Professor Basu’s research is multidisciplinary (bridges environmental quality and human health), inter-sectoral (most projects driven by stakeholder needs, notably government and communities), and driven by environmental justice concerns.
I received a PhD in biomolecular modelling from University College London, researched protein folding and genomics at UCSF and Yale, and am currently a professor of computational biology, focusing on development of techniques to analyze low-complexity and intrinsically disordered proteins, and prions.
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.