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6th DS-I Africa Consortium Meeting

  • Melanie Courtot

    Dr Melanie Courtot - Participant

    Open Data Science Platform (SAB Member)

    Dr Mélanie Courtot is the Director of Genome Informatics and a Principal Investigator at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at University of Toronto. Dr Courtot is passionate about translational informatics - building intelligent systems to gain new insights and impact human health. Her lab aims to build a globally shared knowledge ecosystem to advance science and improve health for all. This requires high-quality data, robust data integration processes at scale and discovery platforms providing data access across international borders. At OICR, her team of 25 develops the Overture software suite, which has helped managed ~3 million genomes (2.5 petabytes of data) accessed by over 300,000 researchers worldwide. Overture supports many active large-scale cancer genomics projects Dr Courtot leads. These include ICGC and ICGC-ARGO (collecting molecular and clinical data for over 100k patients worldwide), VirusSeq (Canadian Covid portal with over 500k SARS-CoV-2 sequences), and the upcoming pan-Canadian Genome Library.