People
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.
B.F. Francis Ouellette is currently consulting in bioinformatics. Francis co-founded the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW) and the Scientific Director of bioinformatics.ca from 1998 to 2022. His research interests included biological sequence analysis, genome annotation and database curation. Francis has dedicated his career to Open Science: the data it generates, how bioinformatics is thought and the publications that report them throughout his career and through his work with the CBW and the many scientific advisory and editorial boards he serves on.
Gabriela is a MSc student in computer sciences at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Fanny Chevalier at the Dynamic Graphics Project, and Dr. Anna Goldenberg’s lab at SickKids Hospital. Her research is grounded in understanding human factors in the design of data- and data-visualization systems in healthcare. She has designed analytics interfaces in both industry and academic settings, and develops tooling in the form of R packages to increase understanding and ease of application of findings through interactive visualizations of the relationships between models and their clinical contexts.
Gary Bader is a Professor at The Donnelly Centre at the University of Toronto and an expert in Computational Biology. The Bader lab is developing computational methods and an ecosystem theory of tissue function that considers cell-cell interactions, cell growth, and cell internal mechanisms, such as pathways, reactions, and causal relationships, to help understand development, cancer and regenerative wound healing processes.
Dr. Gary Van Domselaar, Ph.D. (University of Alberta, 2003) is the Section Chief for Bioinformatics at the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada and Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Van Domselaar’s lab develops methods and pipelines to understand, track, and control circulating infectious diseases in Canada and globally. His research and development activities span metagenomics, infectious disease genomic epidemiology, genomic surveillance, genome annotation, population structure analysis, and microbial genome-wide association studies.
Gregory Butler is Professor emeritus of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He is a founder of the Centre for Structural and Functional Genomics at Concordia where he directs the development of the bioinformatics platform for large-scale fungal genomics projects. His research focuses on advanced IT for knowledge-based bioinformatics, including scientific data management, algorithms, text mining, ontologies and the semantic web. Dr Butler is a founding member of the Canadian Semantic Web Interest Group.