People
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.
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.
I am a computational biologist with a primary focus on the analysis of genomics data related to transcription and gene regulation. My background includes undergraduate studies in mathematics and cell biology, graduate studies in cellular biology and cancer prevention and post-doctoral training in bioinformatics. My lab created the JASPAR database of transcription factor binding profiles and methods for the identification of cis-regulatory regions in the human genome. Being based at BC Children’s Hospital and the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, a second research focus has emerged at the interface between researchers, clinicians and patients arising from the use of whole genome sequencing for the diagnosis of genetic disorders. Our ongoing work focuses on the pursuit of equity for Indigenous peoples through the Silent Genomes Project. Working with clinical partners, my lab maintains IEMbase, an international knowledgebase related to inborn errors in metabolism.
I obtained a PhD degree in Computer Science and Computational Biology at University of Toronto in 2014. Prior to joining McGill, I was a postdoctoral associate at Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT (2015-2018). My research is focused on developing interpretable probabilistic learning models and deep learning models to model genetic, epigenetic, electronic health record, and single-cell genomic data.
Zhaolei Zhang is a Professor in the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine. He also holds cross-appointment in the Department of Computer Science. His primary research interests are gene regulation, noncoding RNAs, and microRNAs, and their roles in human diseases such as cancer He is also interested in the study of macromolecule and small molecule interactions.