Instructors
Dr. Sorana Morrissy completed her PhD in Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, under the supervision of Dr. Marco Marra. She pursued post-doctoral research in translational genomics in Dr. Michael Taylor’s lab at the Hospital of Sick Children in Toronto, ON. Throughout her training she gained extensive experience with cutting-edge high-throughput sequencing technologies and computational analyses in the field of cancer research, with a particular focus on understanding tumor heterogeneity and recurrent disease.
Dr. Tallulah Andrews is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario. Her group focuses on the integration of biological imaging and multiple -omics technologies to understand the structure of diseased tissues. She is a long-term member of the Human Cell Atlas developing computational tools for single-cell RNAseq data while a post-doc at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK and analyzing the Healthy Liver atlas in the MacParland group at UHN Research. She holds a PhD from the University of Oxford where she used systems biology approaches to identify biological pathways underlying rare genetic diseases.
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.
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.