Meet Your Pre-Session Faculty

Chaitra Sarathy, PhD (she/her)

Photo of Chaitra Sarathy

Lecturer
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada

Dr. Sarathy is Bioinformatics Researcher and Lecturer specializing in mathematical modeling and multi-omics integration, including bulk and single-cell RNA-seq analysis. Over the years, she has developed open-source, reproducible workflows for target discovery and machine learning models for patient stratification. As a certified Carpentries Instructor, she is passionate about teaching and helping researchers build confidence in analyzing high-dimensional omics data. She likes to draw on her experiences across the software industry, academic research, and clinical settings to make her teaching practical and grounded in real-world scientific questions.

Jimmy Liu, PhD (he/him)

Photo of Jimmy Liu

Postdoctoral Fellow
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, BC, Canada
—

Jimmy is a postdoctoral fellow trained in bioinformatics and biochemistry. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his research focused on developing novel computational methods to enhance the use of genomics data for enteric disease outbreak investigations and longitudinal surveillance. He also has several years of experience applying nanopore long-read sequencing to clinical diagnostics, including the development of real-time data analysis approaches to accelerate diagnostic turnaround times.

Gustavo Sganzerla Martinez, PhD (he/him)

Photo of Gustavo Sganzerla Martinez

Postdoctoral Fellow
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS, Canada
—

Gustavo works at the intersection of computer science and biology, with research interests centered on mining complex biological datasets to generate actionable insights. His work spans emerging infectious diseases, including mpox and Ebola virus disease, as well as the development of artificial intelligence-based approaches to uncover patterns of gene regulation in microbes and viruses. Having learned biology from biologists, Gustavo sees teaching computational methods as a way of giving back to the scientific community that shaped his interdisciplinary perspective. He is particularly interested in helping biologists understand how computational systems work and how they can be used to address biological questions.

Zhibin Lu

HPC and Bioinformatics Services Manager
Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, University Health Network

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.