Meet Your Faculty
Mélanie Courtot
Senior Director Genome Informatics & Assistant Professor
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research & University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Dr Mélanie Courtot is the Senior Director of Genome Informatics and a Principal Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, and an Assistant Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto. Dr Courtot is passionate about translational informatics - building intelligent systems to gain new insights and impact human health. Her lab aims to build a globally shared knowledge ecosystem to advance science and improve health for all. This requires high-quality data, robust data integration processes at scale and discovery platforms providing data access across international borders. The software engineering team she leads at OICR develops the Overture software suite, which has helped managed ~3 million genomes (2.5 petabytes of data) accessed by over 300,000 researchers worldwide. Overture supports many active large-scale cancer genomics projects Dr Courtot leads. These include ICGC and ICGC-ARGO (collecting molecular and clinical data for over 100k patients worldwide), VirusSeq (Canadian Covid portal with over 600k SARS-CoV-2 sequences), and the pan-Canadian Genome Library. Her research lab complements these activities by exploring methodologies to extract and structure data using AI, LLMs as well while improving its quality through standards design and development.
Mitchell Shiell
Product Manager
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Mitchell Shiell serves as Product Manager and Outreach Lead for the Genome Informatics team at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), helping drive the development of the Overture platform. Overture is an open-source collection of software used to build platforms that manage research data at scale across major global initiatives including ICGC-ARGO (100,000+ cancer patients), PCGL (large genomic files), OHCRN (hereditary cancer data), and iMicroSeq (600,000+ viral genomes). A large part of his work centers on making these data management capabilities accessible to smaller research groups through user-centered design, deployment automations, and comprehensive documentation. His group’s mission is to empower research teams of all sizes to connect and collaborate over their data.
Linda Xiang
Data Scientist II
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Linda is a Senior Data Scientist with over a decade of experience designing and delivering production-grade data platforms for large-scale international genomics initiatives, including ICGC/ICGC-ARGO, PCAWG, GDC, and VirusSeq. Her work focuses on bridging complex scientific requirements with robust engineering solutions, spanning bioinformatics workflow architecture, data services, and platform integration. She has led the development of containerized, reproducible pipelines for genomic data processing and submission across cloud and on-premises environments, and has driven the adoption of standards-based frameworks to improve scalability and maintainability. In parallel, she has led the design of interoperable clinical and genomic data models to support secure data sharing and federated analysis, while contributing to global standards development through GA4GH.
Hardeep Nahal-Bose
Senior Bioinformatics Data Manager
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Hardeep is a Senior Bioinformatics Data Manager on the Genome Informatics team at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) with experience in large-scale biomedical data platforms, clinical data standardization, and metadata management. She has contributed to major initiatives such as ICGC25K, PCAWG, ICGC ARGO, OHCRN, Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) and PCGL, with work spanning interoperable clinical data standards, metadata architecture, data quality and integrity assurance, and user-centered submission platform development. She led the development of the ICGC ARGO clinical dictionary and has contributed to cross-institutional coordination across global research collaborations, working closely with international collaborators to advance interoperable standards in cancer research.
Edmund Su
Bioinformatician
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Edmund is a bioinformatician interested in advancing patient outcomes and uncovering disease pathology through the analysis of clinical and genomics data. As a member of the genome informatics team, he has contributed to projects such as Virus-Seq/iMicro-seq, Pan Canadian Genome library (PCGL), and notably ICGC-ARGO. Through the ICGC-ARGO project, he has coordinated the analysis of the ICGC-ARGO dataset, developed and maintained genomic data processing pipelines, established WGS standards as part of GA4GH.
David Bujold
Data Team Lead @ C3G / Platform Director @ Pan-Canadian Genome Library
McGill University
Montreal, QC, Canada
David Bujold is a bioinformatics software lead based in Montreal, at McGill University. He heads the Data Team at the Canadian Centre for Computational Genomics (C3G), building software solutions for organizing, visualizing, and exploring datasets from large-scale genomic projects. His team develops the Bento data sharing platform, which powers researcher-facing portals for several data sharing initiatives. These include the Pan-Canadian Genome Library (PCGL), a national long-term archive for Canadian genomics and health data supporting cohort submission, researcher access, and federated discovery.
At GA4GH, he is a Discovery Work Stream Co-Lead, and actively contributes to various discovery products like the Experiments Metadata Checklist and the Beacon API, two standards being applied to PCGL’s infrastructure.