Meet Your Faculty
Guillaume Bourque
Professor, McGill University
Director of Bioinformatics, Genome Quebec Innovation Centre
Director, Canadian Centre of Computational Genomics
Director, McGill initiative for Computational Medicine
Dr. Bourque research interests are in comparative and functional genomics with a special emphasis on applications of next-generation sequencing technologies. His lab develops advanced tools and scalable computational infrastructure to enable large-scale applied research projects.
Martin Hirst
Distinguished Scientist, BC Cancer
Professor, Department of Microbiology & Immunology
Director, Michael Smith Laboratories
Michael Smith Laboratories
Dr. Hirst’s research focuses on understanding epigenetic dysfunction in cancer and his laboratory develops experimental and computational tools to characterize normal and transformed cell types down to the single cell level. He applies these tools to explore the epigenomic states of normal and transformed cell types to discover and exploit therapeutic vulnerabilities.
David Bujold
Bioinformatics Manager, Data Unit
Canadian Centre of Computational Genomics
He joined the McGill Epigenomic Data Coordination Center at McGill in 2012 to tackle challenges related to epigenomics, and has since developed many data management and discovery solutions, including the IHEC Data Portal. Other projects of interest include CanDIG and EpiShare, platforms to make genomic and epigenomic data under controlled access more accessible, while maintaining study participants’ privacy.
Jose Hector Galvez
Bioinformatics Manager, Tech Dev Unit
Canadian Centre of Computational Genomics
As a Bioinformatics Specialist in the Research and Development team, Jose Hector is involved in maintaining, documenting, and upgrading the RNA-seq pipelines in GenPipes. He also collaborates in several research projects, mostly focusing on transcriptomics, genome assembly, and epigenomics.
Edmund Su
Bioinformatician
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Edmund is a bioinformatician within the genome informatics team at OICR, where he provides technical knowledge and expertise in genomic analysis. His main focus is developing pipelines and data wrangling for ICGC-ARGO (International Cancer Genome Consortium - Accelerating Research in Genomic Oncology).
Mareike Janiak
Bioinformatics Analyst, Tech Dev Unit
Canadian Centre of Computational Genomics
As a Bioinformatics Analyst in the TechDev team, Mareike is responsible for maintaining pipelines in GenPipes, testing and developing new pipelines for the community, and responding to user requests. Prior to joining C3G, she worked as both a field and computational biologist, with her doctoral and postdoctoral research focusing on mammalian comparative genomics, phylogenomics, and metagenomics, most often in primates.
Michelle Brazas
Acting Scientific Director
Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops (CBW)
Toronto, ON, CA
Dr. Michelle Brazas is the Associate Director for Adaptive Oncology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), and acting Scientific Director at Bioinformatics.ca. Previously, Dr. Brazas was the Program Manager for Bioinformatics.ca and a faculty member in Biotechnology at BCIT. Michelle co-founded and runs the Toronto Bioinformatics User Group (TorBUG) now in its 11th season, and plays an active role in the International Society of Computational Biology where she sits on the Board of Directors and Executive Board.
Nia Hughes
Program Manager, Bioinformatics.ca
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto, ON, Canada
Nia is the Program Manager for Bioinformatics.ca, where she coordinates the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop Series. Prior to starting at OICR, she completed her M.Sc. in Bioinformatics from the University of Guelph in 2020 before working there as a bioinformatician studying epigenetic and transcriptomic patterns across maize varieties.
Zhibin Lu
HPC and Bioinformatics Services Manager at Princess Margaret
Cancer Centre, University Health Network
Bioinformatics and HPC Core, UHN
MaRS Centre, PMCRT 11-707
101 College St
Toronto ON M5G 1L7
Zhibin Lu is a senior manager at University Health Network Digital. He is responsible for UHN HPC operations and scientific software. He manages two HPC clusters at UHN, including system administration, user management, and maintenance of bioinformatics tools for HPC4health. He is also skilled in Next-Gen sequence data analysis and has developed and
maintained bioinformatics pipelines at the Bioinformatics and HPC Core. He is a member of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada Bioinformatics National Team and Scheduling National Team.