Team Members
Project Leader
Michael Brudno
Department of Computer Science
Banting and Best Department of Medical Research
University of Toronto
brudno AT cs DOT toronto DOT edu
Michael Brudno is the Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Computer Science and Banting & Best Department at the University of Toronto. His work
in the last two years has addressed the overall problem of analyzing and interpreting short read data
generated by Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies. Previously, he had worked on the
development of the LAGAN Toolkit for sequence alignment, one of the first packages for multiple
comparison of whole genomes, the VISTA Genome Browser, and the ProbCons package for protein
alignment.
Core Investigaors
Asher Cutter
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
University of Toronto
asher DOT cutter AT utoronto DOT ca
Asher Cutter is the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Genomics, and an assistant professor in the
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. His research expertise is
on the study of population genomics of nematodes. He brings to the project a deep understanding of
genomic evolution, especially at the protein level. In the past he has showed that genes expressed after the
onset of maturity evolve much faster than genes expressed earlier in development, quantified the effects
of genome features on gene function and evolution, and Identified candidate regions for adaptive
evolution in the human genome.
Alan Moses
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Department of Cellular and Systems Biology
University of Toronto
alan DOT moses AT utoronto DOT ca
Alan Moses is an assistant professor in the Departments of Cellular and Systems Biology and Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology. His expertise includes molecular evolution, especially of regulatory non-
coding areas of the genome, transcription binding site detection, and computational genomics. He has
characterized the rates and patterns of evolution in binding sites of sequence-specific DNA- binding
proteins, designed computational tools that could explicitly calculate the likelihood that a particular
sequence was evolving in a manner consistent with a certain evolutionary model and developed statistical
methods to identify non-conserved binding sites and quantitatively analyze the patterns of binding site
loss and gain.
Lucian Ilie
Department of Computer Science
University of Western Ontario
ilie AT csd DOT uwo DOT ca
Lucian Ilie is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science,
University of Western Ontario and Adjunct Professor in the Department of
Computing and Software, McMaster University. His expertise is in
Bioinformatics and String Algorithms. He is working on designing algorithms
and software for genome assembly, read mapping, and correcting high
throughput sequencing data. He developed the most efficient algorithm for
producing highly sensitive spaced-seed, which are used in a wide variety of
bioinformatics tools.
