Organizers

print("Hello World!")

I am Miguel. I trained as a Medical Doctor in Colombia and I have been doing biomedical research for eight years. I began to work with big data as a research clinician working on neglected infectious diseases and then during my Master of Science (Experimental Medicine - UBC), I explored transcriptomic datasets to discover biomarkers for cystic fibrosis. I am currently a PhD student in the Faculty of Health Sciences supervised by Dr. William Hsiao and co-supervised by Dr. Amy Lee.  Our group explores the applications of genomic epidemiology of infectious diseases and the relationship between microbiome and human disease. 

Hello, my name is Negin and I am a Master’s student in the Lee Lab in the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry department. I finished my Bachelor’s degree in MBB with a Genomics Certificate. I was the recipient of the Vice-President Research, Undergraduate Student Research Award (VPR USRA) on two occasions, and have gained research experience in both Dr. Gries’ and Dr. Lee’s laboratories. Currently, I am focusing on the application of bioinformatics analyses to understand complex human diseases, specifically neonatal sepsis. 🧬👩🏼‍💻🧫🦠🧪

Hello World!

My name is Justin, I did my Undergrad at McMaster University in 'the city of the waterfall' in Hamilton, Ontario with a major in biochemistry and biomedical sciences. I had the chance there to work with a variety of great people in the field of bioinformatics, immunology, cardiovascular disease and traditional biochemistry. Now, I decided to pursue the emerging field of bioinformatics by doing a PhD with Dr. Fiona Brinkman at SFU, applying bioinformatics to study genomics in bacteria, particularly surrounding the prediction and the mobility of anti microbial resistance genes. Joining SFU-Omics is a great way of getting to know everyone in the omics field, getting to know tools and analysis pipelines that will be used in downstream analysis.

Hello there! 

I am a second year Bioinformatics graduate student through Simon Fraser University’s Molecular Biology and Biochemistry department. I am working in the Brinkman lab and my thesis project is focused on developing new computational tools to identify putative genomic islands – clusters of genes of probable horizontal origin in bacterial genomes – and to visualize these regions across multiple genomes, which will enable comparison between isolates. My work has applications for genomic epidemiological analyses of disease outbreaks.

I look forward to being part of the Omics group and helping to provide exciting and educational opportunities to the SFU community.

Hello, World!

My name is Marija. I am a Master's student in the Chen Lab.

My research is similar to Matt's ( $_ =~ s/python/perl/ig; ), but I focus specifically on spliced leader trans-splicing, which is a strange phenomenon that happens in C. elegans, as well as other eukaryotes.

My vision for this group is to help build a community of omics interested people at SFU.

I’m Shinta from Dr. Chen’s lab in MBB Department. I’ve just started my Master’s degree this Spring 2017. My undergrad was in Biotechnology, and I had a job as a food analyst before moving 13,036 km away to pursue my MSc here at SFU.

My research is basically similar to Marija’s and Matt’s, which is about alternative RNA splicing. I’m working with alternative cis-splicing, in particular. The plan is to do a comparative analysis among metazoans and explore more into gene level instead of genome-wide using RNA-Seq data. In short, transcriptOMICS!

Let’s gather, share, learn and help each other out! 😊

 Hello Hello. I’m Michelle, a PhD student from Dr. William Davidson’s Lab in the Molecular Biology and Biochemistry Department. As a trained developmental cell biologist and a biochemist, I am diving into the field of Omics. 

My current research studies the effects of climate change on genomic architecture of Pacific Coho salmon. My study is a part of a larger international effort called EPIC4, it aims to conserve and enhance the production of Coho salmon using genomics approaches.

Grad school and post-doc fellowship can be tough, so join the SFUomics community to alleviate unnecessary stress. "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin 

I’m a PhD student in Dr. Fiona Brinkman’s lab studying…bugs and drugs. I completed my undergraduate program with a major in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and a minor in Health Sciences here at SFU. My research involves the computational prediction of microbial drug targets (virulence factors found exclusively in pathogenic species) and the identification of existing drugs with repurposing potential as anti-infectives. Such drugs aim to “disarm” rather than to kill bacteria to reduce selection pressure for anti-microbial resistance. Identifying pathogen-associated genes will not only help to increase drug selectivity, but will also help to uncover the genomic epidemiology of disease-causing organisms and to develop more sustainable public health infection control.

Join the SFU OMICs community to learn and network with other students and omics experts! 

Hello, 

My name is Hossein! I am a Ph.D. student in Computing Science! I am working with Prof. Martin Ester at SFU and Prof. Colin Collins at Vancouver Prostate Centre (VPC). My research is representation learning on omics data with a specific focus on prostate cancer. The computational part of my work mainly focuses on deep learning especially unsupervised learning.

Hello, 

My name is Raquel and I am a PhD student at Computing Science department at SFU. I work with Professor Martin Ester from SFU and Professor Colin Collins from Vancouver Prostate Centre.  My current project is for the identification of driver genes which contribute to cancer development, by using Probabilistic Graphical Models or other Machine Learning algorithms.  

I did my undergrad in Statistics and my MSc in Computer Science (Sports Analytics) at University Federal de Minas Gerais and I believe that being part of SFU Omics group is going to help me increase my knowledge at bioinformatics!

Hello,

My name is Oliver Snow and I'm a PhD student in Computing Science in Martin Ester's lab. My background is in neuroscience and molecular biology but while doing my masters degree in Stockholm I became very interested in bioinformatics and machine learning. My current research is in collaboration with Artem Cherkashov at the Vancouver Prostate Centre where I am trying to predict drug target interactions, specifically adverse reactions, in relation to cancer treatment. My hope is to combine my multidisciplinary background in biophysics and genomics with a new skill set in computer science I will learn here at SFU.

I am excited to be a part of the SFU omics group as it brings together many of my interests and connects people from different disciplines and fosters discussion and collaboration.

Hey there, my name is Kurt and I am a PhD Candidate in the Quarmby Lab at SFU. We study the microbial ecology of snow algae in the mountains north of Vancouver. Snow algal blooms are wonderfully diverse microbiomes that can colour the surface of the snow red, orange or green. It is a very exciting project where we are using DNA sequencing data to understand the breadth of the diversity algae, bacteria, fungi and metazoans, the food webs they form, and the structure of their communities across space and time. And to answer the most common question I get, you should not eat coloured snow! Even red.

I previously completed a MSc in Biology at Laurentian University, working in lake sediments in beautiful northern Ontario, studying how shifting forest compositions around lakes due to climate change and land use change can affect sediment methanogen communities. I completed a BSc in Evolutionary Biology before that at the University of Alberta, where I first got interested in microbial ecology by studying marine algal-bacterial interactions.

I am excited to participate in the OMICS student group, and foster a community that exchanges knowledge, and supports one another to grow and learn.

I did my undergrad in Microbiology at the University of Victoria, now I'm a Masters student in the Chen Lab here at SFU. I'm working with publicly available RNA-seq datasets to do a genome-wide survey for novel transcripts, and their expression patterns, in C. elegans. This has required me to evaluate the current programs for aligning this type of data (such as TopHat and HISAT) to assess their impact on downstream analyses, as well as writing my own tools (generally in Python or R) to integrate the results. I'm excited to see that there is a dedicated community of "omics" people at SFU that I can be a proud to be a part of.

Hello friends, my name is Elijah, and I am a fifth year Bioinformatics student with a minor in statistics. I also work in the Computational Biology and Epidemiology lab led my Dr. Leonid Chindelevitch in the Computer Science department. I recently did two Co-op semesters at the Genome Sciences Centre where I got to perform bioinformatics analyses on real patient data. This made me realize that research was the right fit for me, and a few semesters later, here I find myself!

My current research (along with my partner) aims to illuminate the strain diversity in the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. Borrelia burgdorferi is a bacteria that causes lymes disease and is also prone to coinfection, and as such, using Multilocus Sequence Typing (MLST) is key for illuminating its diversity.

Besides bioinformatics, I am also very interested in machine learning, deep learning, and quantum computing, so please contact me if we share similar interests and would like to have a chat.

Hi there!

My name is Vanessa, I am a marine biologist studying the evolution of recognition genes and mating systems in the lab of Dr. Mike Hart. My work characterizes and compares transcriptomes of reproductive tissues from multiple sea stars to better understand the process of speciation. 

I believe that catalytic collaboration reduces the learning curve and gives results that exceed expectations.

Hello, 

My name is Einar. I’m a mathematics student. My research is related to Deep Learning techniques and its application in problem solving. My NSERC research supervisors are Ben Adcock and Simone Brugiapaglia. I have several years of professional experience in algorithm development for 3D computer graphics, image synthesis and image processing. Also, I have some experience in bioinformatics research, namely DNA Ultra Barcoding and analysis of Humulus Lupulus varieties. I like meeting new people, learn new things, share knowledge, code in python and hack linux.

Hey there! 

My name is Baraa /baraːʔ/ . I am a graduate student at Computing Science department. I work with Cedric Chauve from SFU Math department and Faraz Hach of Vancouver Prostate Centre. 

My work focuses on developing efficient algorithms for cleaning and analyzing genomic sequencing data. 

Hope you find SFU Omics a great place to meet fellow bioinformatics interested people!

Hi all, 

I am a biologist/bioinformatician working on the evolution of immune systems. I did my undergraduate studies in Biology at the National University of Colombia, where I am from. Currently, I am a PhD candidate at Dr. Carl Lownberger's lab working on the innate immune pathways of kissing bugs. 

I love how this group provides a space to talk about different perspectives on all the cool topics we are working. I am looking forward seeing more 'omics' people joining the group soon.