Eight early-career data scientists named inaugural Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awardees following MOHCCN competition

Eight promising, early-career data scientists have been named recipients of the inaugural Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awards funded by the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN). Each receives $40,000 over the next year to be matched by their host institutions for a total of $80,000 to support groundbreaking research in precision oncology.

This new injection of funding totaling $640,000 will support the creation and use of new technologies to analyze data to improve diagnostics and therapies for multiple cancer types, including colorectal, pancreatic, skin and prostate cancers. Winning researchers are based in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.

“Making precision medicine a reality for more cancer patients will require a multidisciplinary approach that necessarily includes professionals who can analyze large amounts of data for the benefit of cancer patients,” says Dr. André Veillette, Network executive director. “These awards support up-and-coming professionals in this field to ensure that Canada nurtures the best and brightest minds, positioning us as world leaders in precision medicine and improving outcomes and quality of life for cancer patients now and into the future.”

The award recipients and their project titles are:

• Farnoosh Abbas-Aghababazadeh (University Health Network – Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) for: Biomarker discovery for immunotherapy response via pan-cancer and cancer-specific analyses
• Riley Arseneau (Dalhousie University) for: Integrating cancer genetics and immunology to design precision therapies for pancreatic cancer
• Parsa Bagherzadeh (Jewish General Hospital) for: Integrating visual patterns and textual data into analyzing MOHCCN skin cancer genomics data (melanoma and basal cell carcinoma)
• Nikta Feizi (University Health Network – Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) for: Linking preclinical pharmacogenomics to clinical genomics for precision oncology
• Caryn Geady (University Health Network – Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) for: Integrating genomic and medical imaging data for precision oncology
• Michael Geuenich (University Health Network – Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) for: Characterizing antigen presentation associated immune escape mechanisms in pancreatic adenocarcinoma using integrative computational approaches
• Peter Her (University Health Network – Princess Margaret Cancer Centre) for: Deciphering the functional landscape of circular RNAs (circRNA) across various cancer types
• Emmanuelle Rousselle (Jewish General Hospital) for: Characterizing the molecular and clinical landscape of non-BRAF mutant colorectal cancer: toward the identification of novel therapeutic vulnerabilities
  

About the Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awards

The Health Informatics & Data Scientist Awards provide outstanding young researchers in health informatics and related fields with funding to support high-quality research in precision oncology. The award is designed to support young researchers as they complete their studies and develop their careers, in close collaboration and mentorship with established MOHCCN funded teams. Researchers currently enrolled in graduate (Master and Ph.D.) and post-doctoral studies in the fields of health informatics, data analytics, data science, computational biology, bioinformatics, and related fields at Canadian institutions were invited to apply.   

Awardees will use the funds to support clinically related research using MOHCCN data, providing information that may form the basis of innovative cancer prevention, diagnosis and/or treatment.

Top row:  Emmanuelle Rousselle, Peter Her, Nikta Feizi, Riley Arseneau. Bottom Row: Caryn Geady, Farnoosh Abbas-Aghababazadeh, Parsa Bagherzadeh, Michael Geuenich