Welcome to the Maguire Lab
We are a research group jointly based in Dalhousie’s Faculty of Computer Science and the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Community Health & Epidemiology.
Our aim is to develop and collaboratively apply data-driven methods to try and mitigate health and social crises. This is focused on two main areas: genomic epidemiology of infectious diseases and inter-disciplinary collaborations with domain experts
Specifically, this former work involves developing and applying novel microbial bioinformatics and machine learning approaches to better understand the diagnosis, evolution, and dynamics of infectious diseases. We largely work on problems related to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and, in the last couple of years, the COVID-19 pandemic with national and international consortia of clinicians and public health experts. Whereas, our broader collaborative data science works includes work exploring online radicalisation with sociologists, patient preference at refugee clinics, and autism-related language-use.
For more details about specific projects, collaborators, and funding sources see Research).
We are located in Dalhousie University and have strong ties to the Shared Hospital Lab located at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, the CARD, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and the Public Health Agency of Canada. This also includes national and international public health consortia such as IRIDA, CanCOGeN, and PHA4GE.
Joining the Lab
We are looking for new enthusiastic and creative PhD students to join the team!
Funding
We are grateful for funding from Dalhousie University, CIHR, NSERC, CANMOD, Genome Canada, SSHRC, and (via PHA4GE) the BMGF.
News
01 September 2024The Pathoplexus database was featured in a news article in Science
Precious Osadebamwen has been awarded one of 14 Research Nova Scotia Scotia Scholars awards
With international colleagues including PHA4GE and Nextstrain initiatives, we have developed the Pathoplexus a new open-source specialised database for human viral pathogens of public health importance
Fin Maguire was announced as a Finalist for the 2024 Discovery Awards in the category of Emerging Professional.
The Canadian One Health Training Platform on Emerging Zoonoses training grant was also funded by CIHR for 6-years. This grant will provide a ton of new training opportunities for graduate students working in this area including lab exchanges and an annual symposia with CAN-AMR-NET.
With colleagues all over the country, our CAN-AMR-NET One Health training grant on AMR was funded by CIHR
Jee-In Kim’s paper doing a deep-dive in feature selection for phenotype prediction was published in Canadian Microbiology Journal
David Mahoney and Xena Li’s work on nested MGEs and hybrid sequencing was published in Antimicrobial Stewardship and Hospital Epidemiology