People
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.
Gregory develops and implements clinical genomic tests focusing on molecular profiling of tumour specimens for Toronto General Hospital and Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. His PhD from the University of Guelph explored the maize developmental transcriptome, showing how patterns of co-regulation can help us to understand the function of unannotated genes.
Dr. Schwartz is a Scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto. He has developed several methodologies for mutation detection, data integration, and cellular population visualization to understand cancer heterogeneity and diverse responses to anti-cancer therapies. His current research involves integrating multi-omic information and leveraging single-cell resolution to identify underlying mechanisms of drug resistance in cancer.
Dr. Hamed Najafabadi obtained his PhD from McGill University in 2012, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in University of Toronto. He joined McGill University as a faculty member in 2016, where he is now an Associate Professor of Human Genetics and holds a Canada Research Chair in Systems Biology of Gene Regulation. His lab develops data-driven computational methods to characterize the role of gene regulatory factors in determining cell identity and function, and combines them with patient omics data to uncover the basis for development and progression of cancer.
My research interests are in next-generation sequencing technologies and pipelines and in better understanding genetic diseases such as cancer. I have a BSc in Cellular, Molecular and Microbial Biology from the University of Calgary and an MBinf (Bioinformatics) from the University of Guelph. I am currently completing my PhD at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and the University of Toronto.