People
Professor Abou Elela obtained his Ph.D. from University of Guelph in 1994 where he generated a system for studying ribosomal RNA processing in vivo and demonstrated the role of rRNA in translation. During his postdoctoral study at the University of California Santa Cruz he revealed the function of the first orthologue of eukaryotic RNase III and demonstrated its role in pre-rRNA processing. Prof. Abou Elela joined the Université de Sherbrooke in 1997 and became a member of the oncology group of the Centre de recherche clinique and the RNA group. Few years later he became the director of Sherbrooke laboratory of functional genomics, the scientific director of Genome Quebec RNomics platform, and the coordinator of the RiboClub. In 2013 Prof. Abou Elela became Canada Research Chair in RNA Biology and Cancer Genomics.
Recent work in Abou Elela lab demonstrated that RNA is a major source of cancer biomarkers and may predict tumour behaviour and drug resistance. His research has also indicated that messenger RNA is programmed to respond to cellular signals and degrades rapidly under exposure to drugs and other cellular stresses. Abou Elela aims to develop a model to explain how RNA production and degradation can influence cellular functions.
The Pai Lab at OICR analyzes high-throughput multi-omic data in the healthy developing and adult brain, and in pediatric and adult brain cancer, to identify diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers for eventual clinical implementation. We work with data from genome sequencing technologies at single-cell resolution (e.g., scRNAseq) and bulk tissue (e.g., RNAseq, WGBS, EMseq, ChIPseq), with sample sizes ranging to cohort-scale. We specialize in understanding the role of the non-coding genome in disease progression.
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. Steven Hallam is a molecular biologist, microbial ecologist, entrepreneur, and innovator with over two decades of experience conducting field and laboratory research at disciplinary interfaces. He is a former Canada Research Chair in Environmental Genomics and current Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and program faculty member in the Bioinformatics and Genome Sciences and Technology training programs at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Hallam is the founding director of the ECOSCOPE innovation ecosystem, founding co-director of the Biofactorial automation core facility in the Life Sciences Institute and co-director of the Bradshaw Research Institute for Minerals and Mining (BRIMM) Microbiome Theme. His research intersects microbial ecology, biological engineering, and bioinformatics with specific emphasis on the creation of functional screens and computational tools that reveal hidden metabolic powers of microorganisms at the individual, population, and community levels of biological organization.
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.
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.
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.