People
Over the past 30 years Dr. Wishart has conducted world-leading research in many areas, including bioinformatics, metabolomics, structural biology and machine learning. He has also made important contributions to medical diagnostics, agri-food research, environmental science and analytical chemistry. Dr. Wishart is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of metabolomics and has played a foundational role in the development of bioinformatics and cheminformatics in North America.
Based on his many important contributions to metabolomics, Dr. Wishart was made a lifetime fellow of the Metabolomics Society in 2014, the society’s highest honour. In recognition of his outstanding accomplishments in bioinformatics, metabolomics and structural biology, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2017), received a University of Alberta Alumni award (2018) and was appointed as a Distinguished University Professor (2018).
He has developed a number of techniques based on NMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, liquid chromatography and gas chromatography to characterize the structures of both small and large molecules. As part of this effort, Dr. Wishart has led the “Human Metabolome Project” (HMP), a multi-university, multi-investigator project that is cataloguing all theknown chemicals in human tissues and biofluids. Using a variety of analytical chemistry techniques along with text mining and machine learning, Dr. Wishart and his colleagues have identified or found evidence for more than 250,000 metabolites in the human body.
This information has been archived on a freely accessible web resource called the Human Metabolome Database (HMDB). Dr. Wishart has also been using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help create other useful chemistry databases, such as DrugBank, FooDB and ContaminantDB and software tools (such as MetaboAnalyst, CFM-ID and BioTransformer) to help with the characterization and identification of metabolites, drugs, pesticides and natural products. Over the course of his career Dr. Wishart has published more than 500 research papers in high profile journals on a wide variety of subject areas. These papers have been cited over 120,000 times.
As an advocate of artificial intelligence, I am passionate about integrating AI techniques and algorithms into my research to extract meaningful insights from vast and diverse datasets. By employing advanced bioinformatics tools, I analyze multiomic data, integrating genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomics, to gain a comprehensive understanding of the cannabis plant and its biological processes.
Furthermore, I am well-versed in the field of genome editing, utilizing state-of-the-art techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 to engineer precise modifications in the cannabis genome. My research in this area aims to unlock the plant’s potential for medicinal, industrial, and agricultural applications.
Through my teaching endeavors, I am committed to nurturing the next generation of computational biologists, equipping them with the skills necessary to thrive in the era of big data and artificial intelligence.
Dr. Eduardo Taboada is an internationally recognized expert on the molecular epidemiology and genomics of Campylobacter jejuni. In 1999 he completed a Ph.D. in molecular genetics at the University of Ottawa and joined the National Research Council, to work on C. jejuni genomics. Since joining the Public Health Agency of Canada’s as a Research Scientist in 2006, he has developed a research programme focusing on bacterial comparative genomics, genome dynamics and the application of genomics approaches towards the study of the molecular surveillance and epidemiology of priority food- and water-borne bacterial pathogens. He leads the Campylobacter Genomics Laboratory at the National Microbiology Laboratory and is head of the Genomic Epidemiology Research Unit. In addition of being a co-principal investigator of a Genome Alberta-funded project on large-scale sequencing on Campylobacter in the Canadian poultry chain, he is a co-investigator on a Genome Canada-funded project on AMR emergence, transmission and ecology and a work package leader in the Government of Canada’s Genomics Research Development Initiative interdepartmental project on AMR.
Emma Griffiths is a research associate at the Centre for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health (CIDGOH) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on developing and implementing ontologies and data standards for public health and food safety genomics to help improve data harmonization and integration. She is a member of the Standards Council of Canada and leads the Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) Data Structures Working Group.
Enze Shi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta, majoring in Statistical Machine Learning. He is co-supervised by Prof. Linglong Kong and Prof. Bei Jiang. His research focuses on developing trustworthy and ethical AI systems, with particular interests in fairness-aware learning, differential privacy and online learning.
Dr. Gaiti is an early career investigator at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto, and Early Career Research Affiliate at OICR. He earned his PhD in evolutionary biology and genomics from the University of Queensland (Australia) in 2017, where he focused on understanding the evolutionary origin of two major players in human gene regulation: long non-coding RNAs and chromatin marks. As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Dan Landau at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York Genome Center, he studied the epigenetic determinants of cancer evolution using novel single-cell multi-omics experimental and computational approaches in blood disorders and brain tumors. These works have been published in highly esteemed journals including Nature, Nature Genetics, and Nature Communications. His work has been further recognized by prestigious federal agencies (NIH, CIHR, NSERC) and awards, including the Emerging Leaders in Computational Oncology Award and the Ontario Institute Cancer Research Investigator Award. Dr. Gaiti research program is focused on developing and applying single-cell multi-omics approaches to answer the fundamental question of how malignant cellular states are jointly determined by genetic and epigenetic alterations, aiming to develop novel therapeutic strategies to directly anticipate and address cancer evolutionary capacity.
Finlay Maguire is a jointly appointed Assistant Professor in Community Health & Epidemiology and Computer Science at Dalhousie University and Pathogenomics Bioinformatics Lead at the Shared Hospital Laboratory. His lab primarily works on developing and applying novel microbial bioinformatics and machine learning approaches to better understand the diagnosis, evolution, and dynamics of infectious diseases. This includes active projects on antimicrobial resistance, outbreak control, and characterisation of novel zoonoses in both clinical and public health contexts. Beyond this, he also engages in a broad range of collaborative data science projects in the areas of computational social science and clinical epidemiology.
Fiona Brinkman, PhD FRSC, is an SFU Distinguished Professor associated with the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, with cross appointments with the School of Computing Science and Faculty of Health Sciences, at Simon Fraser University. The Brinkman lab has been developing bioinformatic resources to better track infectious diseases using genomic data, and improve prediction of new vaccine/drug targets. Her aim is to develop more holistic, sustainable, integrated approaches for infectious disease control, however she is also applying her methods, in particular integrative analyses and database development, to aid child health and environmental research.