[Feb 11, 2019] SFU-Omics Group 18th Meeting - First meeting of 2019

Post date: Mar 11, 2019 5:30:55 PM

To kickstart our monthly meetings in the new year, we invited two SFU alumni as guest speakers, Dr. William Hsiao (Chief Bioinformatician at the BCCDC Public Health Microbiology & Reference Laboratory and MBB adjunct professor) and Elijah Willie (Master's student from the Mostafavi Lab at UBC and also a past SFUomics organizer) .

"Omics in public health" - Dr. William Hsiao

We are now in a digital evolution where data needs to be collected, managed, integrated, analyzed, interpreted and transformed into actions. With high-throughput genomics sequencing incorporated into clinical testing, infectious disease investigations require efficient interpretation of Omics results with contextual information.

"Gene expression cluster-ability - a feasibility study" - Elijah Willie

Data clustering is very subjective. How can we identify what cell types are present in a dataset and can we identify new cell populations? Since random partitions will be present in any given set of data, a significance clustering algorithm is being developed to evaluate whether a dataset should/can be clustered prior to the application of any clustering tools.