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
17 February 2024Precious Osadebamwen has just started in the lab on an exciting project about automating triage of AMR results
The impressive Demeter Lockyer just published her honour’s thesis in Terrorism and Political Violence. This paper analyses online posts to discuss how incel’s position their violence as ideological terrorism.
The Canadian Review of Sociology has just published our paper with Mike Halpin investigating how online incel communities use the perpretaor of the 1989 Polytechnique massacre Lépine to further justify violence against women
Our latest PHA4GE Data Structures paper describing the Pathogen Data Object Model (led by Ruth Timme was published in Microbial Genomics.
Our collaboration with Mubareka and Doxey groups (among many others!) genomically and transcriptomically characterising deer immune response to delta spillover was published in iScience
Taught a MicroResearch clinical epidemiology research capacity building workshop at Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana.
Fin Maguire was awarded the 2023 President’s Research Excellence Award for an Emerging Investigator at the Dalhousie Legacy Awards 2023.
Ran the first PHA4GE Conference on the Cavalli Estate, Cape Town, South Africa (Steering Committee/Scientific Program).
MicroBinfie podcast interview of Finlay Maguire from GMI13