People
Jacek Majewski, Professor of Human Genetics at McGill University, began his adventure in science as a wannabe physicist and, veering through a brief stint with electrical engineering, eventually found his way to biology. He received a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Wesleyan University in Middletown CT, and followed his then fiancée to New York City for a post-doc in statistical genetics with Dr. Jurg Ott at the Rockefeller University. When genome sequencing happened, a background in quantitative sciences proved useful, resulting in his involvement in multiple genomics projects aimed at understanding basic biology, hereditary disease, and cancer. After many years of denial, he was recently forced to admit that epigenetics does indeed exist, which led to ongoing interest in functional epigenomics.
Jacqueline is a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. William Wong’s lab at University of Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy. Her current work focuses on the development of pharmacoeconomic models for health outcomes research. Her PhD thesis entailed a broad-scale comparison of different imputation methods on trait datasets and an investigation of how these methods impact statistical inferences.
James Green (PhD Queen’s University, 2005) is a full professor in the Department of Systems and Computer Engineering at Carleton University. His research focuses on machine learning challenges in biomedical informatics, particularly in the presence of class imbalance and the prediction of rare events. Current research projects include the prediction of protein structure, function, and interaction; the use of supervised and semi-supervised machine learning for the identification of microRNA in unique species; unobtrusive and non-contact neonatal patient monitoring; and the acceleration of scientific computing.
Jasmine received her Bachelor’s degree in Biology, majoring in Molecular Biology and minoring in Marine Biology, from the University of New Brunswick in April 2013. She then pursued her Master’s degree in Epidemiology from the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health from McGill University in May 2016. Her research interest is integrating microbiome and metabolomics data to gain deep functional insights.
My research investigates how the genome functions in stem cells to regulate self-renewal and differentiation. We often think about transcription as occurring on a particular gene in a linear manner whereas the nucleus is a three dimension organelle into which the genome is folded and organised. Within this folded structure DNA regulatory sequences physically contact the genes they regulate forming tissue-specific chromatin loops. We use CRISPR Genome Editing, Molecular Biology and Cellular Imaging techniques combined with Genome-Wide Sequencing approaches and Bioinformatics analysis to investigate the mechanisms that underlie tissue-specific regulation of gene expression and genome folding.
Dr. Jennifer Geddes-McAlister is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Guelph and the Canada Research Chair in the Proteomics of Fungal Disease in One Health. Her lab applies mass spectrometry-based proteomics and bioinformatics tools to investigate host-pathogen interactions with a focus on One Health approaches to overcoming fungal disease. She was recently awarded an Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Lethbridge, a Research Excellence Award from the University of Guelph and multiple early career researcher awards from the Government of Ontario and scientific societies. She is Director of the Bioinformatics Graduate Programs at the University of Guelph, President of the Canadian National Proteomics Network, co-founder of the Canadian Proteomics and Artificial Intelligence Consortium, and founder of ‘Moms in Proteomics’ an initiative dedicated to recognizing and supporting mothers in STEM.
During Jermiah’s time at Western University, he earned a Masters in Medical Biophysics after completing his Bachelors of Science in Integrated Science with an Honors Specialization in Computer Science. With his passion for interdisciplinary science, the Haibe-Kains lab has provided him with the opportunity to use his toolkit of computational skills to solve problems in healthcare.
Jérôme Waldispühl is an associate professor of Computer Science at McGill University. He conducts research in RNA structural bioinformatics and cheminformatics. He also pioneered the use of video games to engage the public in genomic research with Phylo (2010), Colony B (2016), Borderlands Science (2020) and Project Discovery Phase 3 (2020), which have engaged millions of participants worldwide.
His research focuses on statistics and bioinformatics for metabolomics, microarray and next generation sequencing (RNA-seq) data analysis and integration. Some of the tools he developed in the past include MetaboAnalyst for statistical analysis of metabolomics data, MSEA for metabolite set enrichment analysis, MetPA for metabolic pathway analysis, ROCCET for ROC curve based biomarker analysis, and NetworkAnalyst for data integration and network analysis. His general interest is high-throughput omics data analysis using a variety of statistics, machine learning and data visualization technologies.
Dr. Jiarui Ding has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His academic journey includes earning a Ph.D. from UBC, where he was advised by Drs. Sohrab Shah and Anne Condon, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard under the guidance of Dr. Aviv Regev from 2017 to 2021. He holds the prestigious position of Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Single-cell Analysis. He leads an interdisciplinary group at UBC. His research primarily focuses on single-cell genomics, where he has contributed to three key areas: developing computational models, using single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) to study diseases, and benchmarking various scRNA-seq technologies.