2022
21 Oct: The study using COVID Schools Canada crowdsourced data in epidemiological analysis is out in eLife. COVID Schools Canada was a project led by Shraddha Pai and the epidemiological analysis was led by Dr. Paul Tupper of Simon Fraser University. Congratulations to the COVID Schools Canada team!
1 Jun: Ian Cheong is awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship at the Department of Medical Biophysics. Congratulations, Ian!
30 Apr: Ian Cheong is awarded an Canada Graduate Scholarship at the Master’s level, from the Department of Medical Biophysics. Congratulations, Ian!
11 Apr: Shraddha Pai is awarded an NSERC Discovery Grant award. Congratulations, Shraddha!
30 Mar: The Pai Lab is on a team awarded a PROSPECT Oncology award from FACIT, OICR’s commercialization partner. The award will support algorithm development for discovering novel cancer therapeutics and is a collaboration between OICR’s Adaptive Oncology team headed by Lincoln Stein and the Drug Discovery team headed by Rima Al-Awar. Read the press release here.
1 Jan: Welcome to Ian Cheong! Ian joins the lab as a Master’s candidate in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto.
2021
4 Jan: The Pai Lab starts at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto!
17 Apr: Our study on the genetics of peri-adolescent cognition is out in Cerebral Cortex! This work identifies SNPs within the FBLN1 locus as associated with performance in nonverbal reasoning in peri-adolescents, and integrates pharmacogenetic, GWAS, single-cell marker, and epigenomic maps to implicates genes relevant for performance in working memory performance.
14 Apr: Ian Cheong was selected to present a short talk to accompany his poster presentation at the Keystone Symposium on “Single Cell Biology: From Development to Cancer” this June. Ian will be presenting his single-cell genomics analysis to identify evolutionarily recent gene regulatory networks in the developing cerebellum, which may be involved in oncogenesis of pediatric medulloblastoma. Congratulations, Ian!
31 Mar: Shraddha Pai is a co-author on a study prototyping point-of-care detection technology for SARS-CoV-2 using quantum dot barcoding technology. The study titled, Genotyping SARS-CoV-2 Variants Using Ratiometric Nucleic Acid Barcode Panels, was published in Analytical Chemistry.
6 Mar: Welcome to Paul Wambo! Paul joins the lab as a Bioinformatics Research Associate working on epigenomic biomarker discovery and machine learning projects for precision medicine.
16 Feb: The Pai Lab is awarded $100,000CDN for a CIHR Project Grant Priority Announcement for Pediatric Cancer Research! This grant is a collaboration with the Gaiti Lab (Princess Margaret) and Stein Lab (OICR). The funds will support single-cell genomic studies of the developmental origins of pediatric medulloblastoma.
9 Jan: Welcome to Alex Chan and Soumya Menon! Alex and Soumya are University of Waterloo undergraduate co-op students in Biomedical Engineering and Mathematical Physics, and will spend four months in the Pai Lab. Alex’s project involves visualization of gene regulatory networks in the fetal hindbrain. Soumya will develop data processing pipelines for DNA methylome analysis of developing human hindbrain and glioblastoma.