News

Hello, my name is Shaili and I am a 5th year double degree student at the University of Waterloo. Currently, I am an intern at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research (OICR) under Genome Informatics. You can connect with me here if you’d like to connect or chat more! This past October, I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Philadelphia. My experience was filled with inspirational, innovative, and insightful conversations. The theme of this year’s conference, Me + We perfectly captured the essence of what I experienced throughout the event. I wanted to share some of the key moments that left a lasting impact on me.

Andres Felipe Melani De La Hoz (PhD student) has been awarded the 2024-2025 MBP Excellence UTF scholarship for his work on improving clinical trial-patient matching, by using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs, for healthcare data extraction and analysis. MBP Excellence awards are merit-based internal scholarships funded by the Department of Medical Biophysics and the University of Toronto Fund.

I had the privilege of giving a keynote talk highlighting the importance of data quality, in particular in an AI/LLM world, at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), and with many thanks to the BOSC organizing committee and sponsors.

Dr Heidi Rehm, Global alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) chair, announced the formation of the GA4GH Strategic Leadership Committee and the appointment of its inaugural cohort of leaders. Following an open nomination process, ten individuals were selected to join the Strategic Leadership Committee. SLC members have substantial experience working both within GA4GH and in related fields, and will contribute a wide breadth of expertise and a diversity of perspectives to the GA4GH leadership team.

Congratulations to Andres on winning the best research poster prize at the 2024 Temerty Faculty of Medicine Research showcase!

“Data is the most valuable currency in genetics research” - Raymond Kim, in his introduction to the OHCRN Spring reconnect, May 22 2024.

Come meet the Genome Informatics and Courtot lab at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC)

Congratulations to Robin Haw on receiving the OICR Extra Mile award in recognition of his exceptional support to the team!

The Courtot lab is hosting its first summer intern, Pratham Hemlani.

Last week Jon Eubank, technical associate director in the Genome Informatics team and I had the pleasure to attend the GA4GH Connect meeting in Ascona, Switzerland.

Ryan Seeto joined the Courtot lab.

We have been awarded a 3 year Digital Research Alliance of Canada award for the “ICGC ARGO datasets on Alliance Cloud” project. This project seeks to move the ICGC ARGO datasets across to the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance) cloud by leveraging DRAC cloud hosting up to 4PB.

OICR and the Courtot lab have joined the Coronavirus Variants Rapid Response Network (CoVaRR-Net) and have secured additional funding to maintain and expand the VirusSeq data portal until March 2025.