Instructors
Dr. Vasu Gautam is the senior scientist and Bioinformatics Manager at Wishart Node, University of Alberta. Vasu is intrigued by the diverse world of “omics” and their combined role in biological research, be it proteomics, genomics, or metabolomics. Vasu has worked in both academia and industry in the field of multi-omics. His interest has been to explore the different aspects of these “omics” groups and then combine this knowledge pool to address some of the most difficult questions in the field. Bioinformatics/computational biology has been a great tool in enhancing this capability and continuing his research. His current focus is the study of machine learning algorithms and their applications in different areas of metabolomics.
Vicki is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto studying invasive species in the subarctic, from the tundra to the boreal forest, and the effect of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances on invasive species at high latitude. In addition to doing summer fieldwork and analyzing those data, she also teaches “Quantitative Methods in R for Biology”, a third-year undergrad statistics course, and has taught and assisted dozens of workshops to students with a wide range of coding and statistics knowledge.
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.
Yuri Kulish is a PhD student at Dalhousie University. Under the supervision of Dr. Joseph P. Bielawski, and working closely with developers of the IQTREE software at Australian National University, he is implementing and testing new feature support for IQTREE. His primary work is centered around developing the first major software support for a relatively new approach to detecting trait-associated adaptive evolution, the Phenotype-Genotype Branch-Site Model (PG-BSM). His research will build on this model to produce new methods for working with datasets of non-coding sequences, which will be included with its release. Yuri is also a Dalhousie alum, where he completed his undergraduate degree in Biology with a secondary focus in Computer Science.