Group Members

The various members of the Jones Group and their research interests

	Erin Pleasance Staff Scientist The use of genomics for cancer medicine is the focus of my research interests. As a Staff Scientist, I am currently involved in the Personalized OncoGenomics (POG) project, a collaboration between researchers in bioinformatics and genomics, clinicians, and pathologists that uses genomic technologies to contribute to personalized cancer therapy decision making at the BC Cancer Agency. In recent years, I have also been involved in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and various cancer sequencing projects funded through the National Cancer Institute. I completed my PhD in medical genetics at the GSC with Dr. Steve Jones, followed by postdoctoral work at the Sanger Institute in the UK with Sir Mike Stratton, sequencing some of the first cancer genomes.
	Yaoqing Shen Staff Scientist
	Sreeja Leelakumari Postdoctoral Fellow As a postdoctoral research fellow, I have been working with the drug discovery platform in the development of small molecule inhibitors in lymphoma. I work with a team of computational biologists who are involved in the structure-based drug design on protein targets in cancer. I have been involved in the cell line screening to determine the selectivity and efficiency of small molecule inhibitors and validating their mechanism of action by utilizing multiple protein assays. I have also been involved in the BC Cancer agency’s Personalized OncoGenomics project in the analysis and interpretation of whole genome data to guide diagnosis and treatment of patients with advanced malignancies. Together we focus to balance the Importance of Laptop to Bench Top Discoveries with Bedside Application
	Jake Lever PhD Student My research interests focus on large-scale data mining for personalised cancer genomics. I work on several large-scale text-mining and knowledge discovery projects which concentrate on identifying and predicting relationships between drugs, diseases and other terms. I'm also part of the TFRI Glioblastoma project that aims to identify two drugs for human trials. My focus is on correlating genomic abnormalities in brain tumors with drug response in order to create biomarkers to decide treatment. I graduated with a B.Eng. in Software Engineering from the University of Edinburgh with an exchange year at Caltech.
	Jasleen Grewal PhD Student I am currently a PhD student, with a background in computing science, molecular biology, and biochemistry. I am interested in using machine learning models for unsupervised knowledge extraction and application. Specifically, I work on building cancer diagnostic applications from -omics data and developing compact, salient representations of these data. I'm particularly interested in using computational methods to transfer our knowledge of primary cancers into post-treatment genomic analyses of rare cancers.
	Luka Culibrk MSc Student I'm a second year graduate student in the lab. I completed my Bachelor's in Biochemistry at UBC in 2017 and moved to the world of bioinformatics from there. Currently my research focuses on copy number variation in human cancer. I am developing new methods to assess tumour aneuploidy and copy number events using second generation sequencing. I am also investigating the landscape of copy number changes in metastatic cancer, including their associations with cancer types and different treatments.
	Harwood Kwan MSc Student I am a M.Sc student in the department of medical genetics at UBC with a B.Sc in Biochemistry from UBC . My research focus is on the genomic landscape of treated metastatic cancers, using data mining strategies to uncover recurrent mutations and treatment associated genomic alterations. Understanding the genomic landscape will aid our overall knowledge, diagnosis and potentially treatment, of cancer. Mutational associations with treatments will also aid in our ability to provide the proper and most effective therapy to patients. When not sitting in front of a computer, I enjoy going to the gym, playing basketball, and playing guitar.
	Emre Erhan MSc Student I'm an MSc student in the Bioinformatics program at UBC. Coming from an interdisciplinary background, I'm interested in a variety of bioinformatics research. My research background is primarily in computational sequence analysis, however my current interest lie more in using data centric approaches in cancer genomics. Currently, I am working on determining whether anything predictive can be said about how long a cancer patient stays on a drug course based on their genomic data. I graduated from SFU's joint major in molecular biology and biochemistry and computing science in 2018.