Name Philip Awadalla | ||
 | ||
Dr philip awadalla cartagene symposium
Philip Awadalla is a professor of medical and population genetics at the Ontario Institute of Cancer Research, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, and the Department of Biochemistry, McGill University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Ontario Health Study and a PI of the Canadian Partnership for Tomorrow Project (CPTP). He is also the Principal Investigator of the Genome Canada Innovation Node, the Canadian Data Integration Centre. Professor Awadalla was the Executive Scientific Director of the CARTaGENE biobank, a regional cohort member of the CPTP, from 2009 to 2015, and is currently a scientific advisor for this and other scientific and industry platforms.
Contents
Career
Philip Awadalla completed his Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland under the supervision of Professor Deborah Charlesworth in 2001. He then completed a Killam trust Fellowship and Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowships under the supervision of Professors Sarah Otto at the University of British Columbia (2001) and Charles Langley at the University of California, Davis (US) (2001-2003).
In 2004, Awadalla was appointed as assistant professor at the Department of Genetics and Centre for Bioinformatics (led by Prof. Bruce Weir) at North Carolina State University. His work there included identifying potential genetic targets for vaccines to Plasmodium falciparum, the main malaria parasite.
Since 2007 Awadalla has been an associate professor in the department of pediatrics at the Université de Montréal. In 2009 he became the Executive Scientific Director of the CARTaGENE Biobank of Québec. His research focuses on next-generation genomic approaches and the development of computational tools in fundamental genomic research, including genomic approaches to the study of disease. This has included the first genetic maps and mapping of drug resistance genes in malaria. Awadalla discovered the relationship of a histone methylating factor encoded by the gene PRDM9 and child-hood acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Research by Awadalla (with Matthew Hurles of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) was first to directly estimate the number of mutations passed on by individual parents to human offspring, fewer than was previously estimated.
Awadalla is part of a number of collaborative programmes, including the analysis and functional analysis groups of the 1000 Genomes Project.