Experts

Dr Jones is Head of Bioinformatics and Co-Director of the Genome Sciences Centre in Vancouver. He is a Professor of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, and a Distinguished Scientist at the BC Cancer Research Institute. Dr. Jones was identified as one of Canada’s top 40 professionals under 40 by Caldwell Partners International and by Business in Vancouver. He is founding director of the UBC Bioinformatics Graduate Program. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of the prestigious UBC Killam teaching prize in recognition of his contributions to graduate bioinformatic education. In 2014 Dr. Jones was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Faculty of Medicine at UBC and became a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He was recognized by Clarivate Analytics in 2016 and 2018 as among the world’s most highly cited researchers in his field.

Dr. Steven Pelech is a full Professor in the Department of Medicine (Division of Neurology) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he has been on faculty since 1988, and currently serves on the UBC Vancouver Senate. He holds B.Sc. Honours (1979) and Ph.D. (1982) degrees in Biochemistry from UBC. His post-doctoral training was at the University of Dundee with Sir Philip Cohen, and at the University of Washington in Seattle with Nobel laureate Dr. Edwin Krebs. He was the founder and president of Kinetek Pharmaceuticals Inc. (1992 to 1998), and the founder, president and chief scientific officer of Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation (1999 to present). He has authored over 260 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and books about cell signalling system important in the pathology of cancer, diabetes, neurological and immunology-related diseases. Since the beginning of 2021, Dr. Pelech was one of the founders of the Canadian Citizens Care Alliance, and serves as its vice-president and the co-chair of its Scientific and Medical Advisory Committee.

Dr. Sushant Kumar is Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Genomic medicine. His group is interested in developing computational methods and tools to obtain molecular- and genetic-level insight into cancer biology. His lab utilizes genomics, machine learning, and biophysics-based approaches to address these questions.

Tamara Munzner is a Professor at the University of British Columbia Department of Computer Science, and holds a 2000 PhD from Stanford. She has been active in visualization research since 1991 and has published over ninety papers and chapters. She has been papers chair for IEEE InfoVis, EuroVis, and VIS, on the steering committees for InfoVis and BioVis, and the chair of the VIS Executive Committee. Her book Visualization Analysis and Design is widely used to teach visualization world-wide, and she is the co-editor of the A K Peters Visualization book series at CRC/Routledge. She received the IEEE VGTC Visualization Technical Achievement Award, multiple Test of Time Awards from InfoVis, and is an IEEE Fellow. She has worked on problem-driven visualization in many domains ranging from genomics to e-commerce to journalism.

Dr. Tao Huan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He is also the affiliated faculty in the UBC Graduate Program in Bioinformatics, UBC Genome Science and Technology program, UBC Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brian Health. The research focus in the Huan lab is to synergistically develop analytical chemistry and bioinformatics for mass spectrometry-based metabolomics and exposomics. As of Jan 2024, Dr. Huan has published over 85 peer-reviewed papers and has been cited more than 4100 times with an h-index of 31.

The Perkins Lab develops bioinformatics and machine learning methods to answer cutting-edge questions in stem cells, rare genetic diseases, and cancer. Methodology research in the lab focuses on algorithms for omics data analysis and integration, network reconstruction and analysis, biomarker discovery, and stochastic and/or dynamical systems. Dr. Perkins holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which he followed by Postdoctoral training and three years as an Assistant Professor at McGill University. Since 2009 his lab as been in Ottawa, where he is a Senior Scientist in the Regenerative Medicine Program of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology of the University of Ottawa. He also acts as Scientific Director of the Ottawa Bioinformatics Core Facility, and is past Director of the Ottawa-Carleton Joint Bioinformatics Program.

Dr. Touati Benoukraf earned his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, Structural Biochemistry, and Genomics from the University of Aix-Marseille, INSERM-CNRS, France. Following a 2-year postdoctoral training, he achieved scientific independence by receiving a “Special Fellowship” (young investigator award) at the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, National University of Singapore, followed by a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Bioinformatics for Personalized Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Benoukraf’s main scientific contributions encompass both technological and biological aspects, ranging from the discovery of novel epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene expression to the development of bioinformatics tools and a comprehensive database of transcription factor binding sites coupled with DNA methylation profiles (MethMotif.org). To date, Dr. Benoukraf has authored over 49 peer-reviewed manuscripts and serves as an editorial member for the journal BMC Medical Genomics. His current research focus is on pan-omics analytics, with a particular interest in integrating genomics, epigenomics, and microbiomics driver alterations to decipher novel pathological mechanisms.

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.

Ulrike Stege is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Master of Applied Data Science (MADS) program in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Victoria. She was Computer Science Department Chair at the University of Victoria from 2014-2018. She is a member of Quantum BC and an affiliate of British Columbia’s Quantum Algorithms Institute (QAI). She is a Principal Investigator of an NSERC CREATE on Quantum Computing. With her graduate students she works in the area of algorithm development for computationally hard problems, including hybrid quantum-classical algorithms. Ulrike’s interdisciplinary research areas include bioinformatics and cognitive psychology. She received a doctorate from ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Recent projects in bioinformatics focus on the identification of genomic regulatory sequences, as well as RNA and protein structure prediction.

Vladimir Makarenkov is a Full Professor and Director of DESS in Bioinformatics at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He holds a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University and a Ph.D. in computer science and mathematics from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Before joining the computer science department at UQAM, he completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Digital Ecology Lab at the University of Montreal. Vladimir Makarenkov has authored 80 journal articles and 67 conference papers. He has also been awarded the prestigious Simon Régnier Prize and Chikio Hayashi Prize by the International Society for Mathematical Classification. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and data mining. This encompasses the design and development of novel unsupervised and supervised machine learning methods, as well as the utilization of machine learning techniques, including clustering and deep learning, for the analysis of biological and biomedical data.

Dr. Walid A. Houry is Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto. Dr. Houry obtained his PhD from Cornell University and then did his postdoctoral training at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City and at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, Germany. He is interested in the general area of cellular stress responses and the role of molecular chaperones and proteases in these responses. His group is also interested in the development of novel anticancers, antibiotics, and antivirals by identifying compounds that target these chaperones and proteases and result in the dysregulation of protein homeostasis in the cell.

Dr. William Hsiao is a professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) at Simon Fraser University and the principal investigator of the Center for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health. Prior to joining FHS, he was the chief bioinformatician and a senior scientist at the BC Centre for Disease Control Public Health Laboratory (BCCDC PHL) and a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia. He is currently an affiliated scientist at the BCCDC PHL and at Canada’s Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre, and a genomic consultant with the BC Ministry of Agriculture Animal Health Centre. Dr. Hsiao’s research experience and focus includes the analysis of microbial genomics and metagenomics; data science; knowledge engineering; public health management, sharing, and harmonization; as well as infectious diseases and other One Health problems.