Team

Fiona Brinkman is a professor in Bioinformatics and Genomics the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Simon Fraser University, with cross appointments in the School of Computing Science and the Faculty of Health Sciences. She is most known for research and development of widely used computer software that aids both microbe and human genomics analyses. She is currently leading or co-leading several projects involving integrating very diverse data, including a national effort to integrate genomic, lab and epidemiology data and use microbial genomes as a fingerprint to better track, and understand, the spread of infectious diseases. She is on several prominent committees and Boards, including the Board of Directors for Genome Canada, and Chairing the Scientific Advisory Board for the European Nucleotide Archive. She has received a number of awards, including a TR100 award from MIT, and most recently was the first woman in Canada recognized as a Thompson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (top 1% in the computing sciences), and among the “Most Influential Scientific Minds”.

Cedric Chauve is a professor in the Department of Mathematics whose main interest is the development of algorithms and tools for comparative genomics, with a particular focus on methods that accounts for whole-genomes. His current research focuses on bacterial pathogen genomes and malaria-vector mosquito genomes, together with a starting research projects in cancer genomics and flow cytometry bioinformatics.

Peter Chow-White is associate professor and Director of the School of Communication and a faculty member in the medical school at the University of British Columbia. He also is head of Social Aspects at the Centre for Clinical Genomics and a member of the Genome Sciences Centre, BC Cancer Research Centre, and the Personal Oncogenomics Group. He researches the role of communication in the development and diffusion of big data genome technologies and blockchain in health and society and the applied bioethics of adoption.

Martin Ester, a professor in the School of Computing Science, is recognized as an international leader in the research area of data mining, with expertise in particular in clustering algorithms, social and biological network analysis, recommender systems, and data mining for precision medicine. He holds a cross-appointment as Senior Research Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre, where he works on several projects to develop data mining methods for patient stratification, personalized diagnosis and drug discovery. Martin Ester’s publications have received more than 25,000 citations, and in 2016 AMiner ranked him as the most influential scholar in the area of data mining.

Maxwell Libbrecht is an Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He received his PhD in 2016 from the Computer Science and Engineering department at University of Washington, advised by William Noble and Jeff Bilmes. He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he did research with Serafim Batzoglou. His research focuses on developing machine learning methods applied to high-throughput genomics data sets.

Ryan Morin is an assistant professor in the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and a Scientist at the BC Cancer Agency’s Genome Sciences Centre. He has published seminal work in the field of cancer genomics, particularly relating to the genetics of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He demonstrated some of the first applications of miRNA-seq and RNA-seq to human samples and continues to develop strategies to push the limits of DNA sequencing technologies. His laboratory recently developed a novel molecular barcoding strategy to suppress the error rate of massively parallel DNA sequencing technology, a procedure that also involves substantial computational resources. He was Co-PI of the NSERC CREATE program “Computational Methods for the Analysis of the Diversity and Dynamics of Genomes”. 

Nadine Provençal completed her Ph.D. in epigenetics of early life adversity and aggression at McGill University in collaboration with the Research Unit on Children’s Psychosocial Maladjustment in 2013. She then did a short postdoctoral training at the University of Montreal continuing her research on epigenetics and child behavior. Thereafter, she received a research fellowship from the Canadian Institute of Health Research to complete a second postdoctoral training at the Max-Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPIP) in Germany. At the MPIP, she pursued her research on the epigenetic mechanisms involved in the response to stress in the context of psychiatric disorders. In 2014, she was awarded the Richard Todd Award from the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics for her research contribution to the genetics of child psychiatry. Dr. Provencal joined the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University as Assistant Professor in March 2017 and heads the EpiGenOmics of Developmental Trajectories (EGODT) laboratory. She is also an Investigator at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute and Guest Research Scientist at the MPIP.