Dr. Shraddha Pai knew right in high school that she wanted to combine biology and computer science. But it was while doing her undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Bioinformatics at the University of Waterloo, that she developed an intense interest in how the brain worked:

this three pound organ that is the seat of our memories, our sense of reality, and our very identity.

Wanting to combine lab work and computational approaches, Pai completed her PhD thesis on the neuroscience of short-term memory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, where she worked with a rat model of cognition.

Dr. Pai now combines basic and translational research into childhood and adult brain cancers. We still don’t understand why different patients have different outcomes with the same cancer, or why they respond differently to medications. A driving goal in the Pai Lab’s research is to achieve “precision medicine” in brain cancer care. The Pai Lab aim to develop new diagnostic tests and medications that are tailored to a patient’s tumour profile, to increase the chance that a treatment will work.

Dr. Pai believes that achieving this goal requires collaboration across disciplines and a “Swiss army knife” of laboratory and computational techniques to rapidly generate and test new ideas. The Pai Lab studies changes at the DNA level in cancers, and builds models to understand how these changes cascade to impact cell, brain, and cancer function.

Dr. Pai is a recipient of the CIHR Fellowship Award, a Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Award, and the Donnelly Centre Research Excellence Award.

affiliations

Principal Investigator
Ontario Institute for Cancer Research
Toronto

Assistant Professor
Department of Medical Biophysics
University of Toronto

Collaborative Program in Neuroscience
University of Toronto

INVITED TALKS

21 November 2024.
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology department
Michigan State University

30 April 2025.
Toronto Bioinformatics User Group (TorBUG), Toronto

Past

10 May 2024.
Machine learning and brain epigenomes for precision medicine.
Western University Bioinformatics Seminar Speaker.

TEACHING

2025. Drug repurposing. Lecture. MBP1340H Predictive Oncology and Therapeutics.
Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto.

2024 Analysis Using R. Lead instructor. Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop.
[ Course material ] [ Lectures on Youtube ]

2023. Drug repurposing. Lecture. MBP1340H Predictive Oncology and Therapeutics.
Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto.

2023 Analysis Using R. Lead instructor. Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop.
[ Course material ] [ Lectures on Youtube ]

2021 Multi-modal data integration. Module instructor. Canadian Bioinformatics Workshop. [ Course material ] [ Lectures on Youtube ]

Selected publications

Pai S, Li P, Killinger B, Marshall L, Jia P, Liao J, Petronis A, Szabó PE, Labrie V (2019). Differential methylation of enhancer at IGF2 is associated with abnormal dopamine synthesis in major psychosis. Nature Comms. 10:2046.

Pai S, Hui S, Weber P, Narayan S, Whitley O, Li P, Labrie V, Baumbach J, Bader GD. Multi-scale systems genomics analysis predicts pathways, cell types and drug targets involved in normative variation in peri-adolescent human cognition (2023). Cerebral Cortex 33: 8581-93.

Pai S, Hui S, Isserlin R, Shah MA, Kaka H, Bader GD. (2019). netDx: interpretable patient classification using integrated patient similarity networks. Mol Sys Biol. 15:e8497

Awards

2019 – Donnelly Centre Research Excellence Award

2016 – Room with a View. Best in Show. NeuroCentric Arts Competition, Collaborative Program in Neuroscience, University of Toronto

2014 – Brain & Behavior Foundation NARSAD Young Investigator Award

2004 – Natural Sciences Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canada Graduate Scholarship

09/2003 Hon. Mention, Computing Research Assoc. Outstanding Undergraduate Awards

09/2003 iAnywhere Solutions Software Development Scholarship

Multiple terms. University of Waterloo Senate Scholarship

1999 Architel Systems Corporation Entrance Scholarship