Principal Investigator
- Scientific Director (Interim), OICR
- Senior Principal Investigator & Director, Informatics & Bio-computing, OICR
- Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto
Lincoln Stein
Scientific Director (Interim), OICR
Email: lincoln.stein
oicr.on.caThe lead PI for the Collaboratory and an MD/PhD trained in anatomic pathology. He currently directs the ICGC data coordinating centre, leads the Reactome knowledgebase of human biological pathways, and has led the informatics efforts of numerous genome-scale projects including HapMap and modENCODE.
Co-Principal Investigators
- Senior Principal Investigator & Associate Director, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
Vincent Ferretti
Senior Principal Investigator & Associate Director, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
Email: vincent.ferretti
oicr.on.caDr. Ferretti’s expertise is in bioinformatics, with extensive experience in both large-scale software development and computational genomics. Prior to joining OICR, Dr. Ferretti was the Chief Bioinformatician at the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Center, which supported the HapMap project and other GWAS studies. As Associate Director of Bioinformatics Software Development at OICR, Dr. Ferretti’s team develops scalable, portable, open-source software and public data web portals in support of the ICGC Data Coordination Center and NCI’s Genome Data Commons (GDC), both of which have garnered worldwide accolades for their ease of use, performance and technical innovation. Dr. Ferretti also leads the architecture, database structure and pipeline packages of the cloud-based Cancer Genome Collaboratory project. Dr. Ferretti is co-director of the Maelstrom Research program where he is heading the development of open source software for epidemiological data management and harmonization.
- Principal Investigator, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
- Assistant Professor, Department of Medical Biophysics, Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Toronto
Paul Boutros
Principal Investigator, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
Email: paul.boutros
oicr.on.caA computational biologist, develops algorithms for discovery of predictive and prognostic biomarkers in cancer genomes and is responsible for the ICGC Canadian prostate cancer sequencing project’s informatics.
- Senior Scientist & Associate Director, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
- Associate Professor, Department of Cells and Systems Biology, University of Toronto
Francis Ouellette
Senior Scientist & Associate Director, Bioinformatics & Bio-computing, OICR
Email: francis
oicr.on.caA bioinformatician, was coordinator for GenBank for many years, founded the Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops, and built ICGC’s collaborative infrastructure.
Cenk Sahinalp
Professor, Computer Science, Simon Fraser
Email: cenk
sfu.caCenk Sahinalp's background is in combinatorial pattern matching. His recent research focuses on the application of combinatorial algorithms to problems in computational genomics and systems biology. His group develops basic computational methods for the compression and indexing of large bimolecular sequences, as well as algorithmic approaches for variant detection, heterogeneity modeling, and network-based interpretation, especially for cancer genome, transcriptome and proteome data. Computational tools developed by the Sahinalp group include VariationHunter, CommonLAW, DeFuse, Comrad, nFuse, mr & mrs FAST, SCALCE, DeeZ, OptDis, Hit'nDrive, Cliiq, Orman, Dissect and Cypiripi
- Associate Professor, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University
- Director of Bioinformatics, McGill University & Genome Quebec Innovation Center
Guillaume Bourque
Associate Professor, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University
Email: guil.bourque
mcgill.caBackground is in applied mathematics, directs the bioinformatics platform at the Genome Quebec Innovation Centre and develops algorithms for predicting the functional effects of genome variations.
- Associate Professor, Department of Pathology & Computer Science, UBC
- Senior Scientist, BC Cancer Agency
Sohrab Shah
Associate Professor, Department of Pathology & Computer Science, UBC
Email: sshah
bccrc.caDr. Shah received a PhD in computer science from UBC in 2008 and was appointed as a Principal Investigator to The BC Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia in 2010. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Computational Cancer Genomics, and is the recipient of both a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Career Investigator Award and a Terry Fox Research Institute New Investigator Award. His research focuses on understanding how tumours evolve over time through integrative approaches involving genomics and computational modeling. Dr. Shah has pioneered computational methods for inference of mutations in cancer genomes as well as deciphering patterns of cancer evolution. He has pioneered development of novel Bayesian statistical models, algorithms, and computational approaches to analyze large, high dimensional genomics and transcriptomic data sets, from both patient tumours and model systems. This includes advancing molecular profiling of cancer cells at single cell resolution. Dr. Shah has been at the forefront of studying tumor evolution in breast, ovary and lymphoid malignancies. His work has been published in Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Methods and the New England Journal of Medicine.
- Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University of Ottawa
Khaled el Emam
Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University of Ottawa
Email: kelemam
ehealthinformation.caBackground is in electrical engineering and computer science, is a pioneer in applying secure computation techniques to relational and sequence data without revealing personally identifying information.
- Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University
- Director, Centre of Genomics & Policy
Bartha Knoppers
Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University
Email: bartha.knoppers
mcgill.caBartha Maria Knoppers, PhD, is Director of the Centre of Genomics and Policy, Faculty of Medicine, Department of Human Genetics, McGill University, Canada Research Chair in Law and Medicine 2001- and the holder of Chaire d’excellence Pierre Fermat (France) (2006-2008), she was named Distinguished Visiting Scientist (Netherlands Genomics Initiative) (2009-2012). Formerly, Professor at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal (1985-2009) and Senior Researcher at the Centre de recherche en droit public (C.R.D.P.) (1996-2009). Graduate of McMaster University (B.A.), University of Alberta (M.A.), McGill University (LL.B., B.C.L.), Cambridge University, U.K., (D.L.S.), Sorbonne Paris I) (Phd.) she was admitted to the Bar of Québec in 1985. Professor Knoppers was the former, Chair of the International Ethics committee of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), (1996-2004), and member of the International Bioethics Committee of the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) which drafted the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (1993-1997). Co-Founder of the International Institute of Research in Ethics and Biomedicine (IIREB) (2000 – 2009), she founded the Population Project in Genomics (P3G) and CARTaGENE in 2003. From 2000-2006 she served on the Board of Genome Canada, became Chair of the Ethics Working Party of the International Stem Cell Forum, Co-Chair of the Sampling/ELSI Committee of the 1000 Genomes Project (2007-) and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) (2009-). In 2013, she became Chair of the Regulatory and Ethics Working Group and Member of the Steering Committee (TSC) of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health.
Hardware & Software Infrastructure
- Vincent Ferretti , Principal Investigator
- Francois Gerthoffert, Project Manager
- George Mihaiescu, Cloud Architect
- Jared Baker, Cloud Specialist
- Robert Grossman, Collaborator
- Brian O'Connor, Collaborator
- Andy Yang, Software Developer
- Bob Tiernay, Software Architect
- Junjun Zhang, Lead Bioinformatician
- Linda Xiang, Bioinformatician
- Paul Boutros, Principal Investigator
- Gustavo Stolovitzky, Collaborator
- Francis Ouellette , Principal Investigator
- Ann Meyer, Manager, Knowledge and Research Exchange
- Lincoln Stein, Principal Investigator
- Michelle Brazas, Project Manager (formerly managed by Christina Yung)
Indexing, Search & Compression
- Cenk Sahinalp, Principal Investigator
- Jared Simpson, Collaborator
- Bonnie Berger, Collaborator
Variant Identification & Consequence
- Guillaume Bourque, Principal Investigator
- Jared Simpson, Collaborator
- Gary Bader, Collaborator
- Jean Monlong, Research Team
Tumour Heterogenity & Evolution
- Sohrab Shah, Principal Investigator
- Alexandre Bouchard-Cote, Collaborator
- Sohrab Salehi, PhD Cand
- Fatemeh Dorri, PhD Cand
- Andrew McPherson, PDF
- Jafar Taghiyar, Software Developer
- Lincoln Stein, Principal Investigator
- John Irwin, Research Team
- Khaled el Emam, Principal Investigator
- Bartha Knoppers, Principal Investigator
- Mark Phillips, Research Team
