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
18 April 2023We jointly ran a Canadian Bioinformatics Workshops on Infectious Disease Genomic Epidemiology: all the materials are open and can be found here
Gave a lecture on genomic epidemiology to the graduate Infectious Disease Epidemiology class (CHE6052)
Our lab had 5 pieces of co-authored work presented at AMMI/CACMID ranging from finding novel viruses in bats to genomically-informed investigation of mobile AMR genes
Released another PHA4GE pre-print developing quality control tags for public health sequencing datasets
Lecture on epidemiological study design (and statistical methods) as part of a MicroResearch workshop taught at Meru University of Science & Technology in Kenya
Katherine Chan’s work (led by Dr. Jason Moffat) on using CRISPR to screen SARS-CoV-2 host factors was published in Heliyon
A pre-print led by Dr. Jocelyn Stairs evaluating the success of a ob/gyn clinic for refugee women in Halifax was released on ResearchSquare
A paper author with Dr. Mike Halpin and other sociology colleagues on the large scale analysis of misogynistic language use on an incel forum was released as a pre-print in SocaRXiv
Our work on reverse zooanthroponsis of COVID-19 from deer has been featured in an episode of This Week in Virology